Freshman lawmaker Rep. Greg Sablan (R-Saipan) has left his position as head of the Veterans and Military Affairs Office since being sworn in on Capital Hill.<\/p>\n
VMA deputy director Bernadita Boyer Dela Cruz is now the acting executive director.<\/p>\n
Dela Cruz has been with the VMA office for more than 12 years.<\/p>\n
According to Sablan, the appointed executive director for VMA has to be a retired veteran, but it is up to the governor to assign someone to the position.<\/p>\n
Gov. Ralph DLG Torres told reporters that he is currently going through names that are interested in the position.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would be meeting with them [soon] to fill the position. In the meantime, I have Bernie as acting,\u201d said Torres.<\/p>\n
Torres said that Sablan made some recommendations as to who he thinks is a good fit for the position.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Sablan] gave me some recommendations but ultimately, the decision is all up to my office,\u201d said Torres.<\/p>\n
He hopes to fill the position within two weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201c I have this week to meet up with other people that is interested in the position,\u201d he said. \u201cAll of them are former retired military men.\u201d <\/p>\n
Sablan was appointed as the VMA executive director back on Feb. 8, 2016, before winning the election as a member of the CNMI House of Representatives. Sablan is ranked as a lieutenant colonel and is looking to retire from the Army in mid-2017. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Freshman lawmaker Rep. Greg Sablan (R-Saipan) has left his position as head of the Veterans…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[182,200,67,15387],"class_list":["post-245688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-capital-hill","tag-military","tag-people","tag-vma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245688","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\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}