In an emotional and impassioned testimony, Senator Nerissa B. Underwood on Thursday’s legislative session, begged the Governor to walk his talk.
This developed as Underwood’s Bills (182-33 and 183-33) for University of Guam and Department of Education had to be set back because of lack of funds.
“Based on the information that was provided by Chris Duenas, the Special Assistant to the Governor, and also Mr. Blas the Director of Department of Administration, he said well, you know what? Sorry, there’s no funding.
“But let me tell you why I’m so disturbed about that.
“When we held the public hearing on this Bill, the only correspondence I received from the Department of Administration was that they could not support the Bill because the public law regarding the refinancing of the bond had said that it can only go to the Guam Memorial Hospital capital improvement projects and related health projects.”
Underwood said she read the law and it did not say anything about FY 2015 so she went ahead with it, adding she is not violating the law.
“And none of them said ‘We need that, we need that for the tax refund.’ Nobody until the morning that we were deciding as to what bills will go forward did we get a letter from Mr. Duenas who is a Special Assistant to the Governor and say, sorry, we’ve already used that money. Not even a phone call, not even to say Ma’am, we’re going to try to find money for the University of Guam, the $250,000. We’ll work with you, we have an MOU, we’ll make it happen.” Underwood said she is sorry for the students and professors who have been working so hard to improve UOG.
Underwood will send Bill 182-33 to the committee as there is no money for it. “We were told here by the Administration that they don’t have the fund to fix the air conditioning so that our students will be of comfort.”
As to 183-33 which is supposed to appropriate $500,000 for the DOE, this was also sent back to the Committee.
Underwood related that it was not too long ago that Simon Sanchez was almost shut down. She said “they can only clean if they have the supplies; they can only have the supplies if they have the funding.”
She said DOE is short of $5.9 M and additional $1.2 M of reimbursement. “That is not just payroll, that’s about them not being able to save for the contractors for the air conditioning service contract. That’s about them not being able to pay the vendors who provide the supplies and materials so that our kids have their crayons to color with, so that kids the books to read with, so that our students have the pencil to write with. We are now talking about a Department that is building up our generation. But once again, half a million dollars, sorry. Without even giving us a solution how this is going to be met.”
She appealed to her colleagues and the Governor of Guam to “please, for goodness’ sake, let’s walk our talk about putting education first!”
With a cracking voice, Underwood relates the situation to a family in a kitchen table, “when there is only so much to eat, don’t we want our children to eat first? Basically what happened here is we were on a kitchen table, and there was extra food that came in, and a member of our family just decided and say, ‘I’m sorry we got to send that somewhere else where it’s needed,’ and our kids are short of food.”
In ending, Underwood almost practically begged for her colleagues to “Please make sure that our children eat first, that we protect our children first.”
Underwood noted that UOG is short of $4.5 M, DOE is short of $6M, and GCC is yet to receive $6.6M for 2015 fiscal year. Senator Mike San Nicolas confirmed this figure, saying $19M in total for education for fiscal year 2015 is yet to be delivered. He said it was also uncovered that GMHA was also short of $24M of Medicaid reimbursement, an additional of $15.8 M of tax refunds that still have not been paid out, for a total of about $58 M of promises that were made on 2015 that have yet to be fulfilled.
San Nicolas questioned the priorities of the administration saying that, “Almost a year ago, the administration came down here and said, ‘We have more than enough money to pay for raises for elective and appointive officials,’” only to find out a year later that even the $1.5 M 2015 initial savings was already drained./The Junction News Team
