The House of Representatives has finalized a $142-million fiscal year 2017 government budget bill and is set to introduce it in a session this Thursday.<\/p>\n
House Bill 19-196 appropriates $1.42 million for the Commonwealth Development Authority; $13.155 million for the Commonwealth Ports Authority; $50.13 million for the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.; $2.56 million for the Northern Marianas Housing Corp.; $2.08 million for Office of Public Auditor; $49.54 million for the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp.; and $3 million for the Commonwealth Casino Commission.<\/p>\n
The Public School System gets $36.27 million; the Board of Education gets $188,507, while the Northern Marianas College is budgeted $4.42 million.<\/p>\n
The bill gives the CNMI governor 100 percent reprogramming authority within the Executive Branch and also offers salary cap exemptions, essentially salary increases, to several positions in government.<\/p>\n
Under the section on salary cap exemptions, the annual salary of the resident department heads of the First and Second Senatorial district, or Rota and Tinian respectively, are increased to $45,000.<\/p>\n
The annual salary of the resident deputy commissioners of the islands of Rota and Tinian are also amended to $45,000.<\/p>\n
The annual salary for the special assistant for management and budget\/CIP administrator is increased to not less than $62,000.<\/p>\n
Under the bill, $5.97 million is budgeted for the Judicial Branch, including $361,266 for the local drug court.<\/p>\n
Another $7.34 million is budgeted for the Legislature, including $300,000 each for the leadership accounts for the House and Senate.<\/p>\n
Offices under the governor in total get $6.63 million. Under this, the Governor\u2019s Office gets $1.1 million and the Lieutenant Governor\u2019s Office gets $780,000.<\/p>\n
For departments under the Executive Branch, $1.42 million is budgeted for the Department of Commerce; $2.56 million, for the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs; $4.55 million for the Department of Corrections; $3.97 million for the Department of Fire and Emergency Services; $4.83 million for the Department of Finance; $914,706 for the Department of Labor; $2.74 million for the Department of Lands and Natural Resources; $6.01 million for the Department of Public Safety; and $3.56 million for the Department of Public Works for a total of $37.21 million.<\/p>\n
The First Senatorial District, or Rota, gets $7.41, $3.06 million of which goes to the Rota mayor\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
The Second Senatorial District, or Tinian, gets $7.17 million, $3.6 million of which goes to the Mayor of Tinian.<\/p>\n
The Third Senatorial District, or Saipan and the Northern Islands, gets $2.75 million, $2.1 million and $505,870 of which go to the Saipan and Northern Islands mayor, respectively.<\/p>\n
Board and commissions get $1.78 million. These include the Civil Service, election commission, and other boards.<\/p>\n
The bill also stated that $25.63 million are budgeted in total for the government\u2019s independent programs, which include the local library which gets $640,821, a Breadfruit Program that gets $170,600, and $2.877 million for the elected Attorney General\u2019s Office, among others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The House of Representatives has finalized a $142-million fiscal year 2017 government budget bill and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[3279,1414,194,541],"class_list":["post-234799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines","tag-emergency-services","tag-executive-branch","tag-house-bill","tag-northern-islands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234799","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=234799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}