Sen. Justo S. Quitugua (R-Saipan) has introduced a legislative initiative that will clarify that the Department of Public Lands shall receive all moneys\u2014including rental, fees, penalties, and money from court judgments\u2014derived from public lands. <\/p>\n
The legislative initiative seeks to amend Article 11 Section 5(g) of the CNMI Constitution to provide for reasonable expenses by law, require the Legislature to approve and appropriate DPL\u2019s annual budget, and to prohibit the reprogramming of DPL\u2019s revenues.<\/p>\n
Quitugua stated in the legislation that an amendment is needed to make DPL more fiscally transparent and accountable for its \u201creasonable expenses of administration and management.\u201d<\/p>\n
The senator said the Legislature should provide by law and clarify the meaning of \u201creasonable expenses\u201d of administrative and management \u201cin order to prevent DPL from running amok\u201d with such expenses.<\/p>\n
At the same time, he said, in order to prevent DPL from inflating its annual budget and unduly withholding any surplus revenues from the Marianas Public Land Trust, it is necessary for the Legislature to approve DPL\u2019s annual budget to ensure that it complements the department\u2019s actual personnel and operation requirements each fiscal year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sen. Justo S. Quitugua (R-Saipan) has introduced a legislative initiative that will clarify that the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":330486,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[175],"class_list":["post-346474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-dpl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346474","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=346474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}