By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
While giving the thumbs up to the $1.3 billion budget bill and its “conservative revenue projections,” Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero slammed the Guam legislature for allocating funds that may or may not exist.
“The legislature has appropriated nearly $10 million of these unaudited so-called ‘excess revenues,’” the governor wrote in her transmittal of Bill 236-37, which she signed into law with a line-item veto.
“In this budget act, the legislature has gone even further; it is not merely appropriating from reported excess revenues, it is appropriating from excess revenues that have not yet been collected,” the governor added.
The 2025 appropriations bill, which narrowly passed the legislature by a vote of 8-6, is now Public 37-125.
The budget act earmarks the “excess revenues” based on the administration’s Consolidated Revenue Expenditure Report, which identified both the actual revenues collected in excess of the adopted levels as well as the potential “surplus.”
“These types of ‘what if’ appropriations are difficult to operationalize,” the governor said.
“It is an unsound fiscal practice to appropriate from a surplus the legislature merely hopes will materialize in the next fiscal year,” Leon Guerrero said, warning it risks sending the government back into deficit operations.
The spending plan allocates $9 million of the "excess funds" for the Chamorro Land Trust Survey and Infrastructure Fund; $200,000 to fund the pay
adjustments for nurses at the Guam Behavioral Health and Wellness Center;
and $375,000 for the Department of Integrated Services for Individuals with Disabilities’ operations.
“Until such time as these excess collections are reported in our audited financial statements at the end of the fiscal year, it is premature to treat such funds as a surplus, to the degree our government is willing to write checks against them,” the governor added.
While generally pleased with the budget act’s “conservative revenue projections,”
the governor noted several items that did not sit well with her.
She used her line-item veto authority to reject a provision that would chop $200,000 off the Hagatna Restoration and Redevelopment Authority’s budget, and reallocate the slice into Guam Memorial Hospital and the Department of Public Health and Social Services to implement recruitment incentives.
The governor noted that the budget act would provide only 10 bonuses for nurses and only 10 bonuses for social workers, not large enough to make a difference.
“The hospital recruits on average between 40 and 50 nurses every year, and DPHSS' recruitment for social workers so far this year has already exceeded the scant ‘incentive’ the budget act would provide,” Leon Guerrero said.
“While the meager amount would have little impact on our ability to recruit nurses and social workers, the funding would have a substantial impact on the Hagatna Restoration and Redevelopment Authority's ability to fulfill its
mandate of improving housing conditions and employment opportunities that
help to make Guam a better place to live and lead to increased tax revenues that support our future growth,” she added.
The governor frowned on the provision mandating her "to pay hospital vendors,
HVAC system improvements and interface between the electronic health record and billing for [GMH]" and to identity the funding source of such payments.
“This provision represents another example of politicians claiming to do something for our only public hospital while doing nothing at all,” she said.
“To be clear, my authority to operate the hospital comes not from legislative authorization, but from the Organic Act of Guam. The legislature's primary role in the hospital's operation lies in its power of appropriation,” Leon Guerrero added.
She lambasted the legislature for turning down some of the administration’s budget requests, such as $2 million for GPD’s forensic lab and $2 million for the Guam Behavioral Health and Wellness Center.
Subscribe to
our digital
monthly edition
Comments