Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services Commissioner Dennis James C. Mendiola spoke before the House Ways and Means Committee last Thursday to appeal to lawmakers to secure the salaries and fringe benefits of the department\u2019s personnel.<\/p>\n
Speaking at the budget hearing, Mendiola said, \u201cI think all of you understand the magnitude of our responsibility in this community. \u2026[I am] appealing to you to just please consider our department, our agency, and our personnel. The greatest asset I have in this department is the personnel.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Office of the Governor is proposing to allocate $3.5 million to the DFEMS next fiscal year\u2014$2 million below the department\u2019s original proposal, which is $5.5 million. The governor\u2019s proposed budget, according to Office of Management and Budget special assistant Virginia Villagomez, is inclusive of the 64-hour pay period, but does not include other sources of income, such as revolving funds.<\/p>\n
Mendiola explained that he understands the current economic state of the CNMI, and so the only thing he needs is for his personnel to be secured through the budget allocation. For operational resources, they can consider alternate sources of funding, he said. As for DFEMS\u2019 revolving fund, Mendiola said they are also projecting this to go down. \u201cIt might look like we have a lot in the revolving fund but I just want to remind [everyone] that\u2026we\u2019ve been having customers not renew business licenses or their fire permit because they\u2019re not sure if they\u2019re going to open up their business. I just want to remind the body of that notion.\u201d <\/p>\n
DFEMS has 123 employees. Twenty-seven are on Rota and 23 on Tinian. Their hours are also reduced to 96 from 106.<\/p>\n
Ten employees have already been furloughed. Thirty of their personnel are part of the COVID-19 Task Force where a total of over 106 people are being paid out of COVID-19 funds. Mendiola said they are planning to recall the DFEMS staff to regular duty because the department is incurring more overtime cost for employees who are taking up the slack for these 30 at the COVID-19 Task Force. \u201cBecause we deployed 30 personnel, now we\u2019re incurring a lot more overtime. So the plan is to try and bring these guys back,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Due to COVID-19, there has been a 20% increase in ambulance responses, plus the search and rescue missions for DFEMS that range from three days to a week. <\/p>\n
Mendiola further stressed that DFEMS needs to operate on 106 hours, to ensure 100% responding capability from the four stations that they man. \u201cIf we were to cut hours or personnel, that will be impacted, we will have to close either a station or not man [a station], for that matter. That\u2019s the risk that comes on us. In order to maximize the probability of somebody living, we want to respond to them as soon as possible,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services Commissioner Dennis James C. Mendiola spoke before the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":326311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4234],"class_list":["post-326315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-dfems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326315","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\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}