$1.4M to unfreeze wages OK’d

The House of Representatives passed yesterday a bill that appropriates $1.4 million to address the remaining 330 employees whose wages were frozen at Step 12.

House Bill 20-108 HD2, unanimously passed the House yesterday with a 17-0 vote.

Rep. Jose Itibus (R-Saipan) abstained as he is one of the bill’s intended beneficiaries, while Rep. Vinson Sablan (Ind-Saipan) and minority leader Rep. Edmund Villagomez (Ind-Saipan) was absent.

The bill seeks to address the lump-sum wages frozen at Step 12, based on Public Law 10-76, which was later amended in the succeeding legislature by P.L. 11-59.

A statement from the Torres administration commended the House for the passage of the bill.

“My administration and the Legislature both recognize the importance of making sure we fulfill our obligations to the public servants who have waited patiently for their benefits,” said the statement, quoting Gov. Ralph DLG Torres.

The author of the bill, Rep. Angel Demapan (R-Saipan) thanked the employees for their “patience and understanding while the House was making its movement to identify revenues and to appropriate the needed funds.”

He attributed part of the delay to the House having to coordinate with both the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Finance to “make sure we had the complete listing and not have what we experienced in P.L. 19-75.”

“We had to come up with a new bill and identify additional funding because some people were left behind,” he said, referring to the prior appropriation of a similar amount to the same group of people.

According to Demapan, a number of people were not included in the listings of P.L. 19-75, which first appropriated the similar sum of $1.45 million to active and inactive employees.

The issue goes all the way back to the 1990s. The CNMI government at the time was facing a financial crisis, which pushed the CNMI government back then to implement austerity measures.

“For a long while, a lot of government employees were held at a certain pay level; they could not move up the ladder because of a lack of funds,” said Demapan. “The bulk of the people got stuck at Step 12 and were there for many years,” adding that the incident led to former representative Tony Sablan to author P.L. 19-75.