U.S. Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan on Friday said some parts of Gov. Ralph DLG Torres’ spending plan for American Rescue Plan Act funds are “reckless.”
The governor’s ARPA fund expenditure plan includes a total of $780,140 for cabinet members’ “equitable adjustment” in fiscal year 2022, and $6 million for the hiring of 300 temporary workers, 50 of whom will be for Rota and 50 for Tinian.
“I really think it’s a reckless disregard of the public treasury,” Kilili said. “To be honest, I think the governor is taking care of his re-election committee members. Look, [the governor] can do better than that.”
Kilili said federal monies for the CNMI are not “automatic.” Before the U.S. Congress approved ARPA which included close to $500 million for the CNMI, Kilili said they “had to find a formula that would provide some fairness to us because we are a very small [territory].”
He said if the allocation of ARPA funding was based on population, the CNMI would have received “very little” funding.
“So we had to find a formula and we did,” he said.
Kilili said he and his colleagues in the U.S. Congress succeeded in ensuring fairness in ARPA funding for territories; “that is why we got $500 million.”
He also criticized the governor’s use of ARPA monies for Pagan, while “the hospital needs money, too” for its improvement and expansion.
The Commonwealth Utilities Corp. needs power engines but “why isn’t the money going there? That benefits the people long-term, right?” Kilili asked.
He said the CNMI government has been spending a lot of money “and in the end, when the money is out, we’ll get nothing to show for it.”
For example, he said the CNMI has been spending money on hotels. For the travel bubble program, he said, “We subsidized each flight for $45,000, and we are paying for the hotel rooms and we are giving them spending money. And so far, we got less than a hundred people that took part in the program. How much [did] we spend? I don’t know yet but we spent a lot of money. Just think, $45,000 subsidy per flight, and now we have three flights a week.”
