The Senate has endorsed the immediate creation of an in-house task force at the Marianas Public Lands Authority to address pozzolan mining issues on Pagan.<\/p>\n
Senate minority leader Pete P. Reyes said that, in a meeting Friday, lawmakers agreed to issue a statement pushing for the establishment of \u201ca task force that involves residents of Pagan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not endorsing a task force to be funded through a reprogramming authority [as proposed by a House bill] but an internally established task force within MPLA that involves the Northern Islands mayor and residents,\u201d said Reyes. <\/p>\n
The MPLA earlier said that the bill\u2019s proposed task force is unnecessary because the MPLA is capable of reviewing the mining applications internally.<\/p>\n
Reyes, for his part, said an internal task force would be useless if it does not involve concerned parties such as the residents.<\/p>\n
\u201cMPLA has been screwing up. They have a history of screwing up, and I can easily cite cases so I hope they allow residents of Pagan to participate. It\u2019s their island,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said that he has no problem with pozzolan mining \u201cjust like the people of Pagan, but the residents must be involved\u201d in the discussion.<\/p>\n
The senator said that, although Pagan is public land, it does not authorize MPLA to handle the case unilaterally.<\/p>\n
\u201cPublic land means the land is owned by the people of the CNMI. MPLA is only representing the people that own the land,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
MPLA earlier noted that it\u2014not the Legislature or private individuals\u2014have the ultimate authority on the use of Pagan land, citing the lack of ownership by any person of the land. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Senate has endorsed the immediate creation of an in-house task force at the Marianas Public Lands Authority to address pozzolan mining issues on Pagan.<\/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-82385","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\/82385","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=82385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}