Where’s the CNMI budget?

Back at the start of this month, the Saipan Tribune came out with an editorial urging the Legislature to pass the budget. Here we are, just two days before the end of the current fiscal year and we still have yet to see a shadow, a hint, or even just a smidgen of suggestion of a budget.

If the U.S. House and Senate can prepare a $700 billion bailout of financial institutions with as far reaching as those efforts have to be, they do it—in 10 days—why can’t the CNMI government, specifically the Legislature, pass a budget? This is a responsibility of the elected Legislature.

The last piece of good news we had on this front was when the House of Representatives adopted a budget resolution to cap government spending at $156.7 million for the 2009 fiscal year. Since then, there has been nothing but deafening silence. Where is the fiscal responsibility? The moral obligation? Or even just plain simple shame at failing to come up with what taxpayers are paying lawmakers a handsome salary to do? Members of the Legislature get a minimum of $39,000 per annum as basic salary. On top of that, they get discretionary funding, travel allowances, and other monetary perks associated with the job—a lot of it unauditable. Yet for that amount, we can’t even have something as basic as a national budget for the fiscal year?

This, in fact, is still another reason why the state of the CNMI is in such shambles right now. For the last 10 years, the Commonwealth government has passed only two budgets: in 2003 and in 2006. That’s two budgets in a decade! In between, the government has been operating on continuing resolution, using the last passed budget as the de facto spending plan for eight fiscal years. That only works, however, if the economy is growing or, at the very least, in stasis. If the economy is on the upswing, you will always end up with a surplus; if it has plateaued, at least you will have the same revenue as the previous years. Those have not been the case.

Since 1998, the CNMI economy has been going through a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs; lately it has mostly just gone down. The garment industry is already on its deathbed, the tourism sector has yet to return to the halcyon days of the late ’80s, and a lot of businesses have closed up shop due to either the stagnant economy or the stratospheric power rates. That means revenue projections in the 2006 budget plan are already way outdated, with most sources of revenue having already fled these islands. Yet because of the continuing failure of the Legislature to pass a new budget each fiscal year, the Commonwealth government is still operating on the assumption that everything is still A-okay. It’s as if the prospect of facing reality is so appalling that everyone made a collective decision to just bury their heads in the sand in the hope that the problem will fix itself. That technique has never worked for the ostrich and neither will it work for us.

At the risk of sounding like the clichéd broken record, we must emphasize the need for the Legislature to get moving and pass a workable budget as soon as possible. A budget sets the course for the entire year. A government, or any entity for that matter, cannot plan ahead and manage its finances wisely if it does not have a budget plan for the year, and spending money willy-nilly without knowing if one has enough for the entire year is a surefire way to set oneself up for financial disaster. The CNMI is already in deep dodo; let’s not make the hole get any deeper.