Policy fails to help public school sports facilities

by Krystal Paco

Guam - Back in 2004 it was legislation passed to benefit the island's public school sports facilities. But for almost a decade, Public Law 27-114 has been sitting idle and collecting dust.

It was an act authored by then-speaker Ben Pangelinan to allow up to a million dollars in tax credits for contributors to the construction, development, upgrading, repair, and maintenance of any of the island's public school sports facilities. But at Wednesday evening's roundtable, it came to light that a necessary step to fulfill the law's requirements had been overlooked.

Guam Economic Development Authority program and compliance manager Claire Cruz said, "It's my understanding that the reason it hasn't been submitted is because of the requirement of the economic impact study which in house we can't perform that study we don't have the expertise in that and to finance is not within our budget," she said.

That didn't sit well with freshman senator Mike San Nicolas, who said, "I'm in shock that our Guam Economic Development Authority does not have the capacity to do economic impact studies in-house. For us to even suggest that the Department of Education has to go out and do economic impact studies when we have an agency that has 21 employees that's sole purpose of existing is to promote economic development of our island."

Cruz said, "We had an economist at one point in time a long time ago but in the last 20 years I've been in the agency we don't." Senator San Nicolas said, "I appreciate the authors of the legislation that created this bill to open up this capacity and I'm amazed that the reason why our schools are unable to move forward with this enabling legislation is because we can't do something as basic as an economic impact study in our own economic development authority."

Department of Revenue & Taxation director John Camacho confirms the law hasn't been used since its enactment, saying, "We did look into this public law and basically our general procedures we normally do not compute rebates until we get a certificate of compliance from GEDA then we compute the rebate amount and hand that over to the Department of Administration for the rebate payment. But for this particular law we did look into it and we didn't have any certificate of compliance so I'm assured it never went into play."

The easiest fix? Bureau of Budget & Management Research acting deputy director John Pangelinan said, "How to solve this problem very easily? Amend the public law get rid of the Administrative Adjudication Act."

Pangelinan adds that although the Administrative Adjudication Act is required should the Government of Guam be impacted over $500,000 in this case a million in tax credits, legislators could make an amendment.

Meanwhile, DOE superintendent Jon Fernandez calculates needing close to $10 million in work to public school sports facilities, leading governor's education advisor Vince Leon Guerrero to suggest that law be amended to make one million in tax credits a fiscal year limit rather than the cap.

Speaker Judi Won Pat added private schools should also be considered.