The Saipan Mayor’s office has settled its financial obligations incurred from past celebrations of Liberation Day, including a car that was raffled off as part of the prizes last year.<\/p>\n
“They have all been paid those items billed to the mayor’s office. The others are taken care by the Liberation Day Committee,” said Mayor Jose C. Sablan.<\/p>\n
He declined to provide details of the payment or how much money were involved, but said that his office paid for both the 1999 and this year’s July 4th celebrations.<\/p>\n
The mayor also disclosed that he had reached an out-of-court settlement with Joeten Motors over the $5,000 that the office had owed for a brand new car which had been given away as a prize at the 1999 Liberation Day festivities.<\/p>\n
All these funds came from appropriations passed by the Saipan legislative delegation last month, earmarking $171,700 from revenues collected from bingo, batu and cockfight fees on the island.<\/p>\n
According to Mr. Sablan, the municipality received the money only recently after finance officials questioned use of the funds as they were not specified in the appropriation law.<\/p>\n
Aside from prior debts, the money were earmarked for the purchase of parts, equipment rental fees and heavy equipment for the municipality, as well as for fuel and lubrication, a phone system for the new heavy equipment field operation office of the mayor’s office at Lower Base, replacement for Mr. Sablan’s cellular phone, vehicle lease, repair and maintenance.<\/p>\n
The municipal government has been experiencing budget shortfall in recent months because of the cut imposed by the Tenorio administration.<\/p>\n
Mr. Sablan said he is hoping that lawmakers will set aside a bigger budget for the municipality in the next fiscal year, noting the need to repair and maintain several secondary roads on Saipan as well as water delivery services to residents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Saipan Mayor’s office has settled its financial obligations incurred from past celebrations of Liberation Day, including a car that was raffled off as part of the prizes last year.<\/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-53294","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\/53294","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=53294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}