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Lawmakers start looking into Inos’ budget proposal for ’16
The $145.8-million government budget for fiscal year 2016 was officially introduced to members of the House of Representatives at a special session on Rota last week.
The House Committee on Ways and Means will now start looking at the budget proposal in detail and schedule several hearings.
Rep. Antonio Sablan (Ind-Saipan), who heads the committee, said the hearings will be tentatively scheduled after the Rota session last Thursday.
The budget was submitted April 1.
In an initial review, Sablan said the budget requests of government departments and their respective activities exceeded the $145.8-million proposed budget by $38.7 million, Sablan said.
This means not all government departments will get the exact budget that they asked for.
Sablan said his committee will have to sit down with the departments and find out how to “help” these departments with their budget requests.
Like previous years, he said it will be a “challenge” to allocate the available resources, as the departments’ budget requests contain budget for personnel and other “activities.”
“We would have to find out which positions are critical and which are not,” he said, adding that departments will also need to identify priorities.
“We will also try to look for items that are not necessary and which are not, and from there, maybe make the necessary adjustments on a department’s budget request,” he said.
He stressed that once the budget is finalized, the government is bound to “work” with it.
Gov. Eloy S. Inos submitted a budget proposal of $145.8 million to the Legislature to beat the April 1 deadline. The budget represents an increase of $11.5 million, or 8.55 percent, from the budget of the previous fiscal year.
The budget was derived from the gross budgetary resources reported by the Secretary of Finance for fiscal year 2016 at $183.55 million.
House Speaker Joseph Deleon Guerrero (Ind-Saipan) earlier said $145.8 million is “better than $134 million.”
Before the budget submission deadline on April 1, the government hinted that the fiscal year 2016 budget might be $134 million, the same budget it had for fiscal year 2015.
