Ramon B. Camacho, chairman of the council, told Rep. Ramon I. Tebuteb, R-Saipan and chairman of the island’s legislative delegation, that House Local Bill 17-6 “is a step closer in the right direction.”
“Only in the municipal level of governance has there been historically a glaring lack of comprehensive order of succession. It is an anomaly at best, whose structural deficiency may be attributed to the lack of attention to conflicting provisions in the CNMI Constitution, statute, local laws and regulations, thereby compromising internal consistency between applicable provisions,” Camacho told Tebuteb.
According to the legislation, the council chairman will be acting Saipan mayor in case the incumbent is physically absent.
If the council chairman is also physically absent, the vice chairman will become the acting mayor.
If both the chairman and the vice chairman of the council are not physically present to succeed the incumbent mayor, any member of the council will become the acting mayor subject to the designation of the chairman.
The council has three members.
“Clearly, serving as acting mayor is not a matter of semantics. The constitutional statutory and managerial responsibility and duty of the duly elected public officer should not be threaded with lightly and assigned routinely to any contract or civil service employee in the bureaucratic characteristics or complexity of the mayor’s office as it is,” said Camacho.
