The Senate unanimously voted to override several veto provisions in the budget act for fiscal year 2016.<\/p>\n
The Senate voted to override Gov. Eloy S. Inos\u2019 line item veto of \u201cSection 501(c} and (d), which gave 100 percent reprogramming authority to the Chief Justice and mayors.<\/p>\n
The Senate also voted to override Inos\u2019 veto on Sec. 702(c), which was an allocation for the \u201cdrug court\u201d in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
The Senate lastly voted to override Inos\u2019 veto Sec. 704(f), which allows 5 percent salary raises to law enforcement personnel.<\/p>\n
Inos earlier wrote that this provision did not account for personnel on Rota and Tinian, which he said would create morale problems.<\/p>\n
Inos also said requiring law enforcement personnel to use 5 percent of their personnel budget to fund this mandate would require agencies to cut staff and would run counter to the 25-percent cap on overtime.<\/p>\n
During a Senate session yesterday, fiscal analyst David Demapan was to explain the Senate\u2019s position that they did include money for Rota and Titian.<\/p>\n
Demapan said that it was hard to find whether the 5 percent increase is included if looking at the \u201cSchedule A\u201d of the budget law, which showed a \u201cwhole amount.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the way to determine whether that 5 percent salary increase allocation is included [is to] break it down into a t-account, reading to Senators one for Rota\u2019s Division of Customs.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the personnel t-account, the total balance there is showing $144,401. Now that amount really ties into what is showing in schedule A, or public law 19-08. But looking at that amount, we cannot determine whether the 5 percent is included. But by looking at this T-account it shows there that $6,531 for wages and benefits is added on, and so that $144,401 contains the 5-percent salary increase. That\u2019s how we put it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we go to the others, it will be the same exercise,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Sen. Steve Mesngon (R-Rota) said it was sad to hear that the governor says that they did not include his own municipality. \u201cThat was a disgrace for me to hear that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope our people in Tinian and Rota, the law enforcement community, will understand now that yes we did give the two municipality what they deserve, as well as Saipan,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Senate unanimously voted to override several veto provisions in the budget act for fiscal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[20,7853,26,1026],"class_list":["post-213398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-budget","tag-chief-justice","tag-cnmi","tag-david-demapan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213398","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=213398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}