REPRESENTATIVE Tina Sablan last week shared her concern with other House members regarding the “flurry” of executive orders signed by Gov. Ralph DLG Torres.
In an interview on Thursday, the NMI Democratic Party’s gubernatorial candidate said one of Torres’s executive orders gives the Finance secretary unlimited reprogramming power in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
On June 28, 2022, she said the House leadership received several renewals of executive orders dating back to January 2022.
“So, I questioned [why] we only received them all at once now, and they are dated back to January,” Sablan said.
She said they looked at the Commonwealth Register but it did not include the executive orders related to Covid-19 since October 2021.
“Of course we would question why were these [executive orders] backdated, and how significant can these emergencies be if the governor forgot to notify the Legislature or forgot to publish them [in the] register,” Sablan said.
She said the CNMI government has been awarding contracts, including sole-source ones, and making purchases that are not going through the regular procurement process because of the emergency justifications.
“If these [executive orders] were in fact backdated, are they even legally valid?” Sablan asked.
Sablan said the governor has not answered the question, but she hopes he will.
“Why were we not notified? It was only when we started asking questions about contracts, procurement practices or we were even still in a state of emergency that all of a sudden we received a whole bunch of notices at once, and they are all dated back to January? Why didn’t we get them before?”
Tina Sablan
