3 agencies to be spared from budget cuts

The House of Representatives intends to spare three essential government agencies—Public School System, Public Health, and Public Safety—from an across-the-board budget cut.

House Speaker Benigno R. Fitial said that both the leadership and the minority bloc have agreed in principle to exempt the three departments from budget reductions.

“The minority, in principle, agreed also with the few changes [in the budget bill] to keep the budget requests of PSS, Health, and DPS,” said Fitial.

The House finally held a session yesterday at 11am, an hour late from the set schedule, but contrary to expectations, members did not tackle the 2005 budget bill.

“We were hoping to act on it today, but it’s not ready yet. Hopefully, we can pass it on Monday,” said Fitial after yesterday’s session, which lasted less than an hour.

He said the House Ways and Means Committee was still finalizing the budget bill as of yesterday morning.

“We expect that it will be done this afternoon [Friday] so that copies of the bill can be made available to all members,” said Fitial.

He said that minority bloc members had asked for copies of the bill prior to its passage. “They will have this weekend to review the bill and make comments,” said the congressman.

The House had rescheduled its session twice this week pending the revision of the bill.

Fitial said yesterday that the committee, chaired by Rep. Norman S. Palacios, took a lot of time in revising the bill due to “additions” that resulted in budget reductions.

“Every time we receive requests from respective delegations, we continue to reduce the budget. So every single addition has a corresponding reduction. So this what’s taking the budget [so long] to be finalized,” Fitial said.

For example, he said that Rota and Tinian delegations are requesting that retroactive pay be provided for their employees in the new budget.

“So it takes time to identify the reductions, like, where is this reduction going to be coming from? It’s very easy to put in the amount for the retro pay but it takes a lot of time to do the reduction because reduction is taken not only from one place or activity. They have to take it from several activities,” he said.

Earlier, Palacios said that Rota and Tinian would get $500,000 each to fund the retroactive payment.

The House is poised to pass a $212.65 million budget for 2005 when it acts on the bill on Monday. The figure, however, is expected to be raised to $215 million at the Senate in consideration of over $2.1 million in projected revenues to be generated by the newly passed amnesty tax bill.

The Babauta administration submitted a $226-million budget for 2005 but it is said to be amenable to a $215-million level.

Gov. Juan N. Babauta recently met with key members of the Legislature to discuss budget concerns.