The Commonwealth Election Commission is not sure whether the Office of the Attorney General will continue to serve as its legal counsel. <\/p>\n
CEC board chair Frances M. Sablan in an interview said they believe that their legal counsel is still the OAG until Attorney General Edward Manibusan would tell them otherwise because they have not received black and white, telling them OAG no longer serve as CEC\u2019s legal counsel. <\/p>\n
The legal counsel matter was among the issues discussed during CEC\u2019s board meeting last week. The lack of legal counsel at the board meeting prevented CEC commissioners from making a decision whether they have authority to appoint an executive director.<\/p>\n
Julita A. Sablan has been serving as acting CEC executive director for over a year now. She has been working with CEC for 28 years now.<\/p>\n
Asked about the legal counsel discussion, Sablan said there was a question back in 2014 when the AG\u2019s position was up for the ballot.<\/p>\n
Traditionally, OAG has been CEC\u2019s legal representative.<\/p>\n
Sablan said because of AG\u2019s position now being on the ballot there was a question that maybe the office can no longer be CEC\u2019s legal counsel.<\/p>\n
The CEC board chair said they were actually seeking for any interested lawyers out there and that they have some, but they have not met since last December.<\/p>\n
Sablan said they don\u2019t really need legal representation although they seek them whenever they have any legal questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo that\u2019s the question now. We need to ask the AG\u2019s office whether was that a temporary decision? Or is that a permanent decision that we could no longer utilize them as our legal counsel?\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
The chair said CEC needs a lawyer to be with them.<\/p>\n
Sablan said if OAG says they could no longer represent them, then CEC has to hire a lawyer. <\/p>\n
She pointed out that getting a lawyer, however, is not in CEC\u2019s budget so they need to ask the governor for additional budget. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Commonwealth Election Commission is not sure whether the Office of the Attorney General will…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,732,86],"class_list":["post-234738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-budget","tag-cec","tag-oag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234738","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\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}