Acting governor Ralph DLG Torres signed last week a local law to allow funding for the administrative costs of the Technical Services Division under the Department of Public Works.<\/p>\n
House Local Bill 19-12,D2 is now Saipan Local law 19-19. Before the bill was signed, the Technical Services Division could only use 2 percent of the total funds allocated for each locally appropriated capital improvement projects on Saipan over $50,000, provided that the allocation was limited to $10,000 regardless of the total project amount.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe hurdle is that majority of the projects fall under the $50,000 mark,\u201d the local law states. \u201c[DPW\u2019s] end result is zero collection. DPW is not able to collect the 2 percent and would have to rely on collections from other projects that are above $50,000, which is seldom and rare.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Saipan and Northern Islands Legislative Delegation finds that 2 percent of the total funds is not enough to sustain capital improvement projects. This percentage inadequately copes with the costs associated with the processing of such projects, the law says.<\/p>\n
Thus, the new local law amends the Commonwealth Code to mandate a $15,000 threshold instead, with DPW authorized to use 5 percent, instead of 2 percent, of total funds allocated to each project.<\/p>\n
Funds allocated will be strictly for administrative costs like copying, certification, advertisements, architectural and engineering design, and other costs except personnel and travel, according to the local law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Acting governor Ralph DLG Torres signed last week a local law to allow funding for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3192,1114,7922,4337],"class_list":["post-213607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-commonwealth-code","tag-dpw","tag-saipan-local","tag-technical-services-division"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213607","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=213607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}