In the spirit of Christmas, a ranking House official said he has given the Department of Public Works two more weeks to submit documents relating to a probe being done on the hemodialysis project in the wake of allegations of funding mismanagement.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince it\u2019s Christmas\u2026we\u2019re allowing DPW to submit it after the holiday,\u201d said Vice Speaker Timothy Villagomez, who chairs a special committee looking into the alleged funding mess in the construction project.<\/p>\n
Villagomez said DPW Secretary John Reyes personally assured him that the requested documents would be submitted as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
Villagomez earlier warned that the House may use its subpoena powers to compel DPW to submit the documents relating to the controversial hemodialysis project on Saipan.<\/p>\n
He said that his panel sent a notice to DPW in November requesting that it submit all the necessary information within 15 days or about Dec. 3. That deadline was not met.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t understand why the documents should not be made available,\u201d the lawmaker earlier said.<\/p>\n
Villagomez\u2019s panel is asking Reyes to submit all documents, contracts, correspondences, purchase orders, change orders, and any other information relating to the project.<\/p>\n
Meantime, he said his panel would share information with the Senate, which also moved to conduct an investigation on the issue.<\/p>\n
The probe arose after DPW and the Department of Public Health asked for more money to complete the project, despite being already allotted more than $11 million.<\/p>\n
Through the Executive Branch, both departments pushed for over $5 million in additional funding by reprogramming funds from other infrastructure projects. The Legislature eventually reprogrammed $5.8 million from the pending $10-million Kagman wastewater project to ensure the completion of the hemodialysis center. The reprogramming bill was signed into law.<\/p>\n
Both DPW and DPH said the hemodialysis project\u2019s original funding of over $11 million had been depleted due to several change orders allegedly stemming from faulty design work. So far, the project is said to be about 40 percent complete. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the spirit of Christmas, a ranking House official said he has given the Department of Public Works two more weeks to submit documents relating to a probe being done on the hemodialysis project in the wake of allegations of funding mismanagement.<\/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-86695","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\/86695","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=86695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}