{"id":350683,"date":"2021-08-27T06:05:53","date_gmt":"2021-08-26T20:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=350683"},"modified":"2021-08-27T06:05:53","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T20:05:53","slug":"villagomez-says-theyre-now-reviewing-senates-budget-version","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/villagomez-says-theyre-now-reviewing-senates-budget-version\/","title":{"rendered":"Villagomez says they\u2019re now reviewing Senate\u2019s budget version"},"content":{"rendered":"

House of Representatives Speaker Edmund S. Villagomez (Ind-Saipan) said Tuesday that they are carefully looking into the changes the Senate made in its recently passed version of the CNMI government\u2019s budget for fiscal year 2022.<\/p>\n

Villagomez said in an interview that House Ways and Means chair Rep. Donald M. Manglona (Ind-Rota) is going to meet with committee members to just go over the Senate\u2019s version before they can decide whether to accept the changes or not.<\/p>\n

He acknowledged that some issues have come up and they just want to make sure that they\u2019re not as big of an issue as they seem. \u201cSo we just want to make sure that we do our due diligence,\u201d said Villagomez, adding that they will work with the Legislative Bureau staff, their fiscal analyst, and legal counsel to make sure that the provisions in the Senate version are in order.<\/p>\n

The Senate passed Thursday night its version of the $144.84 million budget bill.<\/p>\n

Villagomez said they are optimistic that they should have a budget for fiscal year 2002 before the deadline. The current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, 2021. Unless a budget is enacted by then, the CNMI government will be forced to shut down.<\/p>\n

If the House and the Senate fail to agree on the budget, this will trigger the formation of a conference committee composed of House and Senate representatives that will hammer out a budget that\u2019s acceptable to both chambers.<\/p>\n

If this happens, Villagomez said they should hopefully try to get that budget bill out and maybe get it to the governor by Sept. 11, 2021, so at least the governor has 20 days to review it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Edmund S. Villagomez<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The speaker is optimistic that they may have a decision on the budget by the end of the week. \u201cI think that\u2019s where the decision is going to be made, whether to accept it or reject,\u201d Villagomez pointed out.<\/p>\n

With $175 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, senators appropriated $278,384,323 in combined general local funds and ARPA funds.<\/p>\n

From the $144,848,801 total identified budgetary resources for fiscal year 2022, with deduction of debt service, this leaves the government $98,897,301 that\u2019s available for appropriation. Including the $4,487,022 budget for the Department of Public Lands, the grand total revenue available for appropriation is $103,384,323.<\/p>\n

The Senate\u2019s version of House Bill 22-74, House Draft 3, says that the Legislature concurs with Gov. Ralph DLG Torres\u2019 use of the ARPA funds, as provided in Volume 4 of the governor\u2019s annual budget submission of April 2021 as amended in July 2021, and the ARPA Section 602 to fund salary adjustments for government employees in fiscal year 2022.<\/p>\n

This provision would render moot Manglona\u2019s House Bill 22-33 that has not been acted on by the Senate. That bill seeks to give the Legislature appropriation powers over the CNMI\u2019s share of ARPA money.<\/p>\n

What the Senate did was take Volume 4 of the governor\u2019s submission of the ARPA funds and embedded it into the departments and agencies and municipalities and the different branches of government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House of Representatives Speaker Edmund S. Villagomez (Ind-Saipan) said Tuesday that they are carefully looking…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":350684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-350683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-budget"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350683","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=350683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}