Fiscal year 2020 budget talks are headed toward the unprecedented goal of skipping the conference committee to shoot the annual expenditure bill toward the Governor\u2019s Office as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
In a bid to meet that goal, the Senate broke off from their session yesterday for five-hour recess to discuss with members of the House of Representatives House Bill 21-64, which is still listed in the Senate\u2019s bill calendar as the House version of the budget.<\/p>\n
H.B. 21-64 was reported out of the Fiscal Affairs Committee last Wednesday with no amendments. <\/p>\n
Committee chair Sen. Jude Hofschneider (R-Tinian) told Saipan Tribune yesterday that the goal is to skip the conference committee and come up with an end product more quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we are trying to attempt here is to work with the House members, to have them accept the Senate product so that we can avert the need for a conference committee or a need for them rejecting our version and [forming] a conference committee,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A\u00a0conference committee\u00a0is an ad-hoc panel created to resolve disagreements on a specific bill.\u00a0The heads of the Senate and the House of Representatives appoint the committee\u2019s members.<\/p>\n
All annual budget bills since fiscal year 2012 have been products of conference committees. Before that, the government was allowed to go into continuing resolutions, which means adopting the previous year\u2019s budget ceiling.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually tried to do this [before but it didn\u2019t push through]. We are actually very optimistic and confident that things are\u2026going to happen,\u201d Hofschneider said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am very, very confident that [we will come up with a final budget for Gov. Ralph DLG Torres\u2019 review before the deadline],\u201d he told Saipan Tribune. The deadline for the fiscal year 2020 budget is Sept. 30, 2019. Failure to enact a fiscal year 2020 budget would result in the shutdown of the government until the governor enacts a budget bill.<\/p>\n
The Senate convened yesterday for a session at 11am in the Senate chamber on Capital Hill, but went into recess at around 11:30am to go into discussions on H.B. 21-64. It wasn\u2019t until around 4:30pm when the Senate got out of recess, only to go into another recess to reconvene discussions today, at 9am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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