Attao: More revenue-generating bills needed

For 2020, Speaker Blas Jonathan Attao (R-Saipan) is asking members of the House of Representatives to craft revenue-generating legislations that would help the CNMI economy.

“One of the bigger things that I asked the members of the House is to think creatively and come up with legislations that are revenue-generating for our home. That’s the vision for 2020,” he said in a short interview.

With recovery efforts as last year’s biggest challenge, the House had to get infrastructure back on track, to recover from the losses of the first quarter of 2019, according to Attao.

“We introduced some legislation to alleviate some of the financial situations that we went through, like owing our vendors, overtime payments, [Federal Emergency Management Agency] matching, and all other assistance that we got from the outside,” the speaker said.

While there are still people struggling and living in tents, the assistance from the outside has helped the CNMI economy recover in terms of the local workforce and in getting the local infrastructure “back in place where we’re on our way to getting normal.”

Attao added that with the Northern Marianas Housing Corp. getting more than $243 million in Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery funds, the CNMI is going to start seeing that money flow within the next six to eight months.

“That’s new monies that’s going to be put back into our economy will help our economy grow and get our infrastructures back, hopefully get a lot of our people out of these tents and build more sustainable living conditions for our people,” he said.

For 2020, from the House’s side, the speaker said that the representatives have already done some work in 2019 to get them some new monies to circulate in the economy. But Attao said that they “need to do better in finding other revenue-generating legislations so that we can get that flowing back into our economy.”

“During the inauguration of 2019, the message that I presented was that we will move as quick[ly] as our people in recovering, and we want to move quick[ly] and I hope we did enough to get us at least out of the water,” he added. “2020 is to try to get our body out of the water so we don’t have to worry about swimming anymore, we can be walking on shallow water. That’s the goal for 2020.”