With revenues falling, the Commonwealth Ports Authority must keep a tight watch over its expenditures for the remaining six months of 1999 to meet its financial obligations while maintaining the smooth operations of its facilities.<\/p>\n
This developed as CPA management prepared a $1.5 million budget for the agency’s operations for fiscal year 2000. But board member Roman S. Tudela, chairman of the finance committee, wants the proposed budget revised to reflect the cost-cutting measures implemented by management and the approved increases in airport and seaport fees.<\/p>\n
Airport operating budget alone is $8.5 million or a 12 percent reduction from the current fiscal year’s appropriation. Seaport budget for FY 2000 is $1 million, which is an eight percent decrease from this year’s appropriation.<\/p>\n
Debt payment is still the biggest problem of the ports authority as the regional crisis has led to the drastic decline of the airport revenue. Interest on the $20 million airport bonds is payable semi-annually at 6.25 percent. For 1999, the ports authority would have to pay $1,245,625 in interest as monthly interest payment alone would cost the ports authority some $103,000 a month at this time when revenue at the airport has been on a decline due to the reduction in service of airlines.<\/p>\n
Based on the financial analysis of the airport division alone for fiscal year 1999, the ports authority was able to generate some $403,666 in profits. But this does not cover the $618,000 interest payments which it must also cover during the six months period for the airport debt.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, payment of the $33 million debt at the seaport is not much of a problem since it’s revenue was not severely affected amid the slowdown of the island’s economy. However, it has to meet monthly interest payment of $178,000 or a total of $1,060,000 for interest of the seaport debt alone.<\/p>\n
The ports authority has begun cutting down the working hours of its employees from 80 to 72 hours per pay period last April which would give the CPA some $550,000 in savings for the year. At the same time, the board approved to reduce by 50 percent its contribution in the employees’ health insurance benefits.<\/p>\n
Three months from now, the wharfage fee shall increase by $3.25 per revenue ton while port entry fee, dockage rates, bunker fee and home port fee shall increase by 30 percent.<\/p>\n
The board has also increased its passenger facility charge by 39 percent from $5.79 to $8.00 per passenger and a 65 percent hike in landing fee from $.85 to $1.40 beginning March 1, 2000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With revenues falling, the Commonwealth Ports Authority must keep a tight watch over its expenditures for the remaining six months of 1999 to meet its financial obligations while maintaining the smooth operations of its facilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46285","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}