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![\"Budget](\"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Budget-pix2.jpg\")
<\/a>At 4:42 pm yesterday, the bicameral committee tasked with resolving differences between two versions of next year\u2019s budget adjourned their session, ending weeks of prolonged negotiations and delays as Gov. Eloy S. Inos and department heads braced for a government shutdown with no budget resolution in sight.<\/p>\n
The deadline for the Legislature to submit a budget for Inos\u2019 signature is on Sep. 30.<\/p>\n
House and Senate conferees formally adopted a budget bill yesterday. And also adopted a committee report that detailed their compromise over some of the bill\u2019s most contested provisions.<\/p>\n
When they first met nearly three weeks ago on Sep. 3, conferees had three primary issues: the use of \u201coutside resources\u201d or Inos-directed earmarks for the Marianas Visitors Authority; concerns from the Public School System over ripping away expenditure authority from the education commissioner and giving it to school principals; and salary increases for law enforcement and department heads.<\/p>\n
In some form, these Senate provisions remained in the budget settled upon yesterday.<\/p>\n
The Senate locked on MVA earmarks to fund program money shortfalls for money first appropriated to fund their provisions. They had moved the local hospital\u2019s utility subsidy, at first, but the House got this off the table.<\/p>\n
The lawmakers agreed to modify MVA\u2019s budget to fund $1,802,403 for Department of Public Work streetlights; $200,000 for an x-ray machine at the airport; $225,000 for a container and loose cargo x-ray machine at the seaport; $75,000 for a handheld x-ray scanner at the seaport; and $200,00 for the Mayor of Saipan for cleanup and beautification projects.<\/p>\n
\u2018Decentralized\u2019 spending<\/p>\n
The Senate wanted to task the Public School System for reports about unkempt campuses on Tinian and telling students to bring their own toilet tissues. They got that, in some form, too, in a bill that gives the expenditure authority to the education commissioner, but \u201cprovided that the expenditure authority for the operations of each public school\u201d would be the school principal.<\/p>\n
PSS has expressed its concerns about this power over \u201coperations,\u201d saying that this provision creates a new system that would \u201cdecentralize\u201d spending and give it to principals.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoes that mean that each school will now pay for their own utilities? Negotiatie for a printer? Buy textbooks for their students that may differ from another sister school?\u201d writes Board of Education chair Herman Guerrero and Education Commissioner Dr. Rita Sablan in a joint letter to the House in late August.<\/p>\n
As operational expenses are only budgeted a few million dollars, the education leaders said these expenses \u201cmust be fluid in order to deal with emergencies\u201d and shortage of funds that occur system-wide at different schools.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bottom line is that money must be fluid because an emergency on Rota is not Rota\u2019s emergency; it is the CNMI Public School System\u2019s emergency,\u201d the education leaders wrote last month.<\/p>\n
Salary increases<\/p>\n
The conferees agreed to the following salary increases:<\/p>\n
-$62,000 for the special assistant for Office of Management and Budget from annual salary of $54,000<\/p>\n
-5-percent increase for all law enforcement officers<\/p>\n
-$45,000 for Rota and Tinian department heads from a salary of $36,000<\/p>\n
-$45,000 for Rota and Tinian deputy commissioners for Fire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The year fiscal 2016 budget talks finally was resolved in a compromise bill yesterday that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":211036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[20,1222,65,41],"class_list":["post-211024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-budget","tag-education-commissioner-dr","tag-house","tag-public-school-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}