Officials and board members of both the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. and the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. faced each other in a closed-door meeting yesterday, signaling the start of a potential settlement between the two agencies.
\nCUC earlier sued the healthcare agency for the latter\u2019s utility debt totaling $11.9 million as of March 31 this year. During an April 14 meeting of the CUC board, a decision was made to issue another demand letter to the public hospital and public schools. If the responses are unsatisfactory, CUC plans to file a motion for judgment in court.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, CHCC board of trustees vice chair Pete Dela Cruz disclosed in an open session that another meeting with CUC must be scheduled as a follow-up to what was discussed in the closed-door meeting.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reason why we\u2019re setting a date is because we have to meet with CUC to come to an agreement of how much CHCC can actually pay,\u201d said Dela Cruz.<\/p>\n
He also disclosed that based on CUC board chair David J. Sablan\u2019s comments, the utility agency is amenable to allowing the hospital to arrange a repayment plan that probably would add an extra amount for past arrears\u2014for instance $5,000\u2014on top of the current billing the hospital would pay CUC.<\/p>\n
Dela Cruz reminded both interim CEO Esther Mu\u00f1a and interim CFO Cora Ada the importance of providing the board a \u201ccredible\u201d cash flow for the organization.<\/p>\n
Meantime, trustee Roy Rios pointed out that without the accurate financial records, the board\u2019s goal of developing a \u201cdeficit reduction plan\u201d is unachievable.<\/p>\n
As of March 31, 2014, CUC\u2019s aging receivables from PSS, CHCC, and the central government totals over $22 million. Of this amount, the bulk is owed by CHCC, at $11.9 million; $6.4 million is owed by the Public School System; and about $3.6 million is uncollected from the central government.<\/p>\n
CUC has a huge underpayment in its books, about $7.3 million from October 2012 through December 2013. This is primarily due to the inability of its largest customers to timely pay its bills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Officials and board members of both the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. and the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[54,666,49,41],"class_list":["post-33233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-agency","tag-chcc","tag-cuc","tag-public-school-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33233","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\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}