Aside from electing candidates for political and nonpolitical positions, the CNMI voters will also have to decide on Saturday to either ratify or reject a proposal to decentralize the control and regulation of public funds.<\/p>\n
The proposal, contained in Legislative Initiative 11-4, seeks to remove the power of the Department of Finance to regulate public funds appropriated to the legislature and the judiciary.<\/p>\n
LI 11-4, which is one of the four proposed laws and constitutional amendments up for referendum on Nov. 6, seeks to amend Article II section 17 of the CNMI Constitution to establish a finance office within the legislative bureau to control and regulate the expenditure of the legislature’s funds. It also proposes to establish a separate finance office for the judicial branch, which would take place by amending Section IV section of the CNMI Constitution.<\/p>\n
The two finance offices would be mandated to implement separate regulations for the legislature and the judiciary.<\/p>\n
These finance bodies would also be tasked to develop and implement accounting procedures “that require full and reasonable documentation that public funds are expended for public purposes.”<\/p>\n
The fate of LI-4, introduced by Sen. Edward Maratita, rests on the general electorate.<\/p>\n
Rota voters will answer the question of whether or not they want to legalize and establish a casino industry in their island. Tinian voters will be asked if they want to revise the Tinian Casino Gaming Act of 1989.<\/p>\n
Also up for general ratification is LI 11-1, which seeks to restrict to indigenous voters the right to vote on Article 12-related issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aside from electing candidates for political and nonpolitical positions, the CNMI voters will also have to decide on Saturday to either ratify or reject a proposal to decentralize the control and regulation of public funds.<\/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-48634","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\/48634","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=48634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}