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Fitial: CNMI to see stimulus money next month
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Posted on Apr 24 2009
Stimulus money should start flowing into the Commonwealth in May or June, according to Gov. Benigno Fitial.
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the CNMI is going to receive close to $100 million in formula grants. The government has been receiving notices of these funds for the last few months.
The money should actually start arriving to the CNMI in the next few months, the governor said earlier this week.
The stimulus team, led by Commerce Secretary Mike Ada, has been preparing competitive grant applications and recently submitted the first application for the Community Oriented Policing Services grant, which will provide money for the Department of Public Safety to hire additional law enforcement.
At a news briefing this week, Fitial reiterated his earlier promise that money from the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds grant will help cover payroll for furloughed government employees.
“The plan is, because of the overridden budget veto, I won’t have enough money to keep everyone on the payroll throughout the fiscal year, so I have no choice but to remove some people from the payroll,” he said. “However, the plan with the stimulus is to bring those people that I furloughed, because you know there is no money locally, back into the payroll.”
The administration had originally planned on using all the $8 million in discretionary money for payroll, but last week Esther Fleming of the Office of Management and Budget said government officials are now planning on reserving approximately $5 million for the Department of Public Health’s Medical Referral Office. The MRO has seen a spike in numbers but was only budgeted for $5,172 for non-personnel costs in Fiscal Year 2009.
Now the plan is to allocate majority of the money to DPH and use the remaining $3 million to cover employee payroll.
