With the economic crisis brought by the coronavirus pandemic, it\u2019s becoming more and more financially challenging for the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. to operate 24 hours a day, according to CUC executive director Gary P. Camacho. <\/p>\n
When asked if there is any plan to cut CUC employees\u2019 biweekly 80 work hours schedule, Camacho said last Wednesday he still needs to work with the board of directors about that since they still need to operate a large infrastructure\u2014water, wastewater, and power transmission, distribution, and generation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s still a huge responsibility to ensure that all of that is operational,\u201d he said in an interview. <\/p>\n
He said that keeping utility services available all the time 24 hours a day is \u201cobviously overwhelming,\u201d but that they understand the need to do so.<\/p>\n
Camacho said they are already implementing austerity measures\u2014he did not specify what those measures are\u2014 but reduction in work hours is just an extreme or expanded cost-cutting measure. At present, CUC is the only agency that\u2019s not cutting work hours among government and autonomous agencies.<\/p>\n
Camacho said that, right now, in his talks with CUC\u2019s chief financial officer about the earlier cost-cutting measures, they were able to sustain their operation budget at a bare minimum.<\/p>\n
He said they believe that, at some point, they will have to cut work hours, adding that this is just something that they\u2019re reviewing at the management level. He said they would reduce the work hours as needed, but he could not determine that now.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, of course, like anything else, we would always try to minimize any impact to our employees and to our consumers as far as available services [are concerned]. We would like to be open five days a week,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Camacho said that, if any measures were taken, it would be, at the bare minimum, a reduction of eight hours per week, and then they would expand that as needed. \u201cBut again, it\u2019s something that we have to look into. And we\u2019re preparing. We have plans for it already,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the economic crisis brought by the coronavirus pandemic, it\u2019s becoming more and more financially…<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-320074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320074","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=320074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}