Senate President Joaquin G. Adriano urged Gov. Juan N. Babauta to approve the 2005 budget bill, which authorizes the government to spend up to $218 million in fiscal year 2005.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand that they [administration] are still working on the bill. I\u2019m not sure about the governor\u2019s decision but I hope he approves it,\u201d said Adriano.<\/p>\n
He said he sees no major reason why the Executive Branch would reject the bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think there is substantial reason,\u201d he said, noting that the major issue on Public School System funding was carefully addressed by the budget conference committee.<\/p>\n
The Legislature, upon recommendation by the conference committee, approved nearly $40 million for PSS under FY 2005, which is about $3 million more than the PSS\u2019 existing local funding.<\/p>\n
The Babauta administration requested $42 million for PSS, some $3 million lower than the $45 million that PSS originally asked for.<\/p>\n
Babauta announced a week ago that he would commit $20 million in Compact Impact funds to PSS over the next four years. This fund would be used for PSS\u2019 capital improvement projects.<\/p>\n
Meantime, Lt. Gov. Diego T. Benavente said the executive office continues to review the FY 2005 budget bill.<\/p>\n
The governor has 20 days to act on the appropriation bill, which was formally transmitted to the Governor\u2019s Office a few days before Christmas.<\/p>\n
Babauta earlier threatened to veto the bill if it does not raise the PSS budget to the requested amount.<\/p>\n
Finance Secretary Fermin Atalig recently said that the governor may veto altogether or line-veto the $217.7 million proposed budget. He said the governor aims to see funding increases for PSS as well as payment for government utilities. He said the Legislature only appropriated $4 million for utilities payment in FY 2005 when the government\u2019s actual need is about $8 million. The continuing resolution puts the utilities funding at $5 million.<\/p>\n
The administration submitted a $226-million budget request to the Legislature for FY 2005 in April 2004.<\/p>\n
The House of Representatives in September 2004 endorsed a $213 million funding level while the Senate raised it to $218 million following the administration\u2019s submission of additional funding projection of over $5 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Senate President Joaquin G. Adriano urged Gov. Juan N. Babauta to approve the 2005 budget bill, which authorizes the government to spend up to $218 million in fiscal year 2005.<\/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-86849","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\/86849","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=86849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}