Overappropriations

Acting Speaker Eddie B. Calvo has introduced a bill providing additional appropriations to the Guam Public School System, the Guam Memorial Hospital, the Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Public Health and Social Services.
The supplemental appropriations, according to Bill 180, would be taken out of the $9.8 million that the government of Guam stands to save as a result of the refinancing of the 1993 general obligation bond authorized by Public Law 29-19, the 2008 budget act.
So, they have discovered an area where GovGuam sees savings, or potential savings. But is it really necessary to spend every penny that our government officials find?
Technically, the $9.8 million that the bill has identified is not actual money. This is an appropriation that GovGuam would have been using for debt service.
And since GovGuam is just about to float $77 million to refinance the 1993 general obligation bond, it won’t be needing debt service fund for this fiscal year.
This would have been a temporary relief, but why the rush to use up these savings?
The Legislature was confident that it passed an adequate budget law for fiscal year 2008. GPSS, specifically, gets almost 50 percent of the budget on top of the extra funds that it will receive from proceeds of the $77 million bond. GPSS must be able to prove its trustworthiness before the Legislature gives it more money.
We would like to assume that everything was taken care of under the 2008 budget act. So why did our senators suddenly think that they needed to make supplemental appropriations just because they found extra money?
Such seeming addiction to making appropriation and spending public funds contributes to the structural imbalance of this government budget

Preventing school terrorism

With the ongoing Top Off terrorism exercise, we must not lose sight of another form of terrorism that is plaguing the nation’s schools.
Recently, there has been another shooting in the states, sadly making school shootings an ordinary occurrence in the mainland now.
We must not allow this to happen in our island and Sen. Adolpho Palacios is right in saying that education officials have to be proactive about this.
The senator had suggested that the school board develop a response for each school in the event that a shooting rampage occurs.
We believe that the Guam Public School System must go one step further.
School officials should not only have a plan in place on what to do after a shooting occurs, they must also adopt measures to prevent such a shooting from occurring in the first place.
Just as we are preparing for a national terrorist attack, we must also prepare for student terror in our schools.