Responding to concerns that his veto delayed a major request-for-proposal process for port concessions, Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said he supported a bill he vetoed Monday that would have allowed the Commonwealth Ports Authority to offer concessions to different bidders at different ports and allow them to negotiate with existing concessionaries without conducting a public search for a new one, but reiterated the \u201cvery unconstitutional parts of the bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s better to delay the project that sign something that I know is not only unconstitutional now but I am 100 percent sure will be contested from the way it\u2019s done,\u201d Torres told reporters yesterday.<\/p>\n
Torres, when pressed, agreed that the bill was drafted in communication with CPA and the attorney general\u2019s office but said, \u201cwhat came out is an unconstitutional bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said this was \u201cadvised by the AG,\u201d or Attorney General Edward Manibusan. \u201cAnd we got to stick to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The governor, in his veto message on Monday, said the bill\u2014House Bill 19-123\u2014would limit future legislatures from amending the business gross revenue tax and business license fee the bill\u2019s proposed provisions, even as implicit in the lawmaking power of a legislature is the principle that one legislature cannot enact law that prevents future legislatures from exercising its lawmaking power.<\/p>\n
\u201cA statute may not be enacted that irrevocably binds successor legislatures,\u201d Torres wrote. He was flagging a provision, among others, that would have assessed a tax of 4 percent on gross sales and bind this tax from being increased during the term of the concession agreement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Responding to concerns that his veto delayed a major request-for-proposal process for port concessions, Gov….<\/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":[56,1198,194,50],"class_list":["post-230031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-business-3","tag-commonwealth-ports-authority","tag-house-bill","tag-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230031","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=230031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}