The Public School System heaved a huge sigh of relief when House Bill 14-369, which would exempt them from paying the 12-percent hike in the employer contribution to the Retirement Fund, last week when Gov. Juan N. Babauta signed the bill into law.<\/p>\n
Acting Commissioner of Education David M. Borja said the news was a very positive turn of events.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we won\u2019t have to worry about the $6.2 million composed of $4.5 million budget from local account and $1.7 million from federal account,\u201d he said, adding that this money would eat up a huge chunk of their 2005\u20132006 budget proposal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can now also be assured not to have the adverse impact to the number of people that are currently working in our programs\u2014the SPED, Early Childhood. and the Head Start,\u201d Borja said.<\/p>\n
The $6.2 million savings from the exemption could be deducted from the $50-million budget proposal, Borja said. He added if the governor-elect Benigno R. Fitial would give PSS at least $44 million budget, the PSS would accept it gladly. \u201cI believe we will do [with $43.8 million] very well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Currently, the PSS is operating under the continuing resolution that gives them $37.2 million operational budget for the last five years now.<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago the House of Representatives disapproved the Senate version of the bill allocating the budget to the PSS, which expressed earlier that it preferred the lower chamber\u2019s version than the Senate version.<\/p>\n
It was wrongly reported this week [not from Saipan Tribune] that the outgoing governor failed to sign the bill making it a law by default. Under the Legislative procedures a bill automatically becomes law on the 40th day after it is transmitted to the Governor\u2019s Office for action and fails to act on it.<\/p>\n
The bill was authored by Rep. David Apatang and co-authored by Reps. Jesus T. Attao, Arnold I. Palacios, and Benjamin Seman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Public School System heaved a huge sigh of relief when House Bill 14-369, which would exempt them from paying the 12-percent hike in the employer contribution to the Retirement Fund, last week when Gov. Juan N. Babauta signed the bill into law.<\/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-95847","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\/95847","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=95847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}