by Ken Quintanilla

Guam - Senator Brant McCreadie is once again calling on his colleagues in the Guam Legislature to move forward with legislation to build a new correctional facility.

McCreadie in a release says the pleas from Department of Corrections to build a new prison have fallen on deaf ears as his Bill 172 introduced over a year ago has yet to be heard on session floor.

“If Bill 172 will not pass due to partisan politics, I call on the Legislative Majority to introduce their own legislation to either establish a new mandate to construct this much needed correctional facility, or to look at existing laws, such as Public Law 28-60, also known as the “Public Safety Facilities Construction Initiative Act of 2005” to get the construction process started,” McCreadie says.

McCreadie continues to reiterate that this is not a partisan issue, but rather an inescapable public safety issue. He hopes lawmakers put protection before politics and says “the bottom line is this: we either spend the resources now to construct a facility to keep all of us safe, or we will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more down the road to eliminate both the overcrowding situation and potential federal receivership.

Meanwhile it was last week when the Department of Correction began circulating a petition to draw support for Bill 172 to be heard on session floor.