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Finance Secretary David DLG Atalig said Thursday the CNMI government has accumulated over $80 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds last fiscal year that were spent mainly for \u201cprovisions of government.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to an inquiry about ARPA funds during a radio press briefing, Atalig said the $80 million is just off the top of his head but they will release to the media the exact figures as soon as their staff prepares everything.<\/p>\n
He said the \u201cprovisions of government\u201d refers to Section 603C of ARPA, which allows the government to recover and get assistance through ARPA for lost revenues.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s identified by saying where we\u2019re at in terms of our revenues compared to pre-pandemic budget level,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Atalig said they expended close to $80 million last fiscal year in their ARPA mainly to bring back over 160 people that were furloughed and putting their salaries 100% on that funding.<\/p>\n
He said they also lifted austerity when they got the ARPA funding and that allowed the government employees to get 100% of their salary in terms of hours. <\/p>\n
He said 20% of every government employee\u2019s salary is covered by ARPA until they get through this COVID-19 pandemic or until ARPA funding allows them. <\/p>\n
\u201cI will be coming out with a report in next couple of weeks with more details,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
The CNMI government received in May 2021 $481.9 million in ARPA that was allocated to the Commonwealth. The ARPA money provides emergency funding for the ongoing COVID-19 emergency, replenishes lost government revenues during the pandemic, and brings back jobs within the government that were lost during the pandemic. <\/p>\n
Atalig earlier stated that ARPA has different sections of funding and that the $481.9 million is the amount that Section 602 provides for the CNMI. <\/p>\n
In June 2021, Atalig presented details of how the government plans to spend $512,076,165 million in ARPA funding\u2014considered the largest one-time cash gift the federal government has ever given the CNMI so far. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finance Secretary David DLG Atalig said Thursday the CNMI government has accumulated over $80 million…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":358893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358892","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=358892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}