The recent federal government shutdown made the specter of pulling the plug on various programs under the purview of the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs \u201ca real possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is because the department staff is a mixture of federally funded employees and locally funded employees, said DCCA Secretary Robert Hunter.<\/p>\n
He spent most of Monday reaching out to grantor offices on what the federal government shutdown meant for the department. \u201cA large part of [Monday] morning was trying to get some guidance but it was kind of hard to get guidance from our grantors.\u201d
\nHunter said that just anticipating the impact the shutdown would have on the department made him restless, but the situation was resolved soon after.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was expecting to come in and find, \u2018Yeah, you need to shut down\u2019 but when I came in, it was all good,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
Hunter said most of DCCA\u2019s grantor offices were supposed to go in for four hours yesterday just to close up shop and provide guidance for the states and territories. <\/p>\n
\u201cLuckily for us, nothing was affected. Most of the responses we got from our grantors were \u2018we won\u2019t be at work and our offices will be shut down but you\u2019re going to continue with your operations because you’ve already gotten approved for all these grants,\u2019\u201d said Hunter. \u201cWe were lucky\u2026we are okay,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
According to Hunter, the Aging Center was one of the programs that was at risk of being affected if the shutdown had been prolonged. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was one of the things we tried to get guidance on because the Man\u2019amko Center deals with so many people\u2026I did tell Walter [Macaranas, Aging Center director] to give everybody a heads-up that there is a possibility [of a shutdown] but we were waiting on guidance,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
As it is, DCCA will continue operations unimpeded but it will just need to make sure that the department didn’t have days of obligations that they couldn’t pay. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf [the federal government shutdown] would have gone on into February, yes, we have programs that would have started running unfunded like the second week of February,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Hunter is happy that the shutdown was not prolonged or the department would have faced complications. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf this was a prolonged, we would have definitely been affected but in the short term, no,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent federal government shutdown made the specter of pulling the plug on various programs…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2966,34],"class_list":["post-268623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-aging-center","tag-dcca"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268623","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\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}