Demapan ask Labor for report on use of CW fee funds

Rep. Angel Demapan (R-Saipan) wants to know how this fiscal year’s Commonwealth Worker Fee funds were spent by the local government, after being told by the local trades school that these funds are almost depleted and how this could “drastically reduce or cancel” the school’s trades classes.

“With about three months remaining in the current fiscal year, it has been brought to my attention that one of the recipient of these funds, namely, the Northern Marianas Trades Institute, has been informed by your office that the funds derived from the CW fee fund is almost depleted,” Demapan wrote in a July 5 letter to Department of Labor Secretary Edith DeLeon Guerrero.

“If this is the case, I respectfully request your office to delineate the expenditure of these funds from the beginning of the current fiscal year to date,” he added. “The Commonwealth is at a critical juncture as we raced against time to build the capacity of our citizen workforce in light of the looming expiration of the 2019 CW transition deadline. As such, it is more critical than ever for the Commonwealth to ensure that funds dedicated to training and enhancing our citizen workforce is being spent for exactly that purpose.”

CW fees are sourced from the federal law which established the transition worker program and last year’s fiscal budget bill appropriated $1.7 million of these and designed them to the Labor secretary as the discretionary authority.

They were restricted solely for the purpose of ongoing vocational educational curricula, program development by CNMI educational entities, and related data survey.

Comment from the Labor department was not yet available as of press time yesterday.

Demapan says it is unknown at this point, what kind of adverse impact a depleted fund would pose on the Northern Marianas College, which is another recipient of these funds.

“I am dismayed to find out that…NMTI is now on the verge of having to drastically reduce or cancel its scheduled classes in automotive, hotel and restaurant operations, culinary arts, construction, electrical, and air-conditioning because of the unexpected news that the CW Fee Funds are nearing depletion this early in the fiscal year,” Demapan said in the two-page letter.

He said the Commonwealth has exerted tremendous efforts to prepare its citizens for the workforce and said it was imperative that they continue to move in this direction to “not just build our workforce, but also attract our graduates from colleges and universities abroad to return to the CNMI and become part of our growing economy.”