DUE to deficient cost benefit analysis, the House of Representatives has decided to refer to the House Committee on Public Utilities, Communications and Transportation a measure which seeks to increase Verizon’s gross annual revenue contribution to the government.
After the lawmakers’ many questions on H.B. 13-33 that were left unanswered by the committee, the House during a session Tuesday, decided to return the measure to the committee so it could make a sufficient cost-benefit analysis on the bill’s intent of raising Verizon’s contribution rate from 0.5 to 2.5 percent.
Committee Chairman Joseph P. Deleon Guerrero, the bill’s author, earlier said that P.L. 12-39, which created the Commonwealth Telecommunications Commission and placed the contribution rate at 0.5 percent, had to be amended.
Deleon Guerrero, R-Saipan, said the 0.5 percent was a “result of a typographical mistake” and should be corrected by making it 2.5 percent, which was the “historically intended rate.”
But House Speaker Heinz S. Hofschneider, the House minority leader during the 12th Legislature, maintained that the 0.5 percent was not a mistake as the past Legislature did intend to reduce it to 0.5 percent.
Since 1978, the Micronesian Telecommunications Corp., which later became Verizon, had been paying a contribution rate of 2.5 percent until the effectivity of P.L. 12-39 in 2000 when Verizon’s contribution rate was reduced to 0.5 percent.
