Governor Lou Leon Guerrero signed the $1.3 billion budget bill for Fiscal Year 2025 into law, despite her disappointment in some questionable priorities and critical funding cuts.

Notably, the GovGuam entity to get the least local funding at zero dollars is the Office of Homelessness and Poverty Prevention.

As KUAM reported, OHAPP’s $1.06 million appropriation from the general fund intended for salaries was removed from the budget bill and reallocated to other areas by lawmakers.
OHAPP Director Rob San Agustin said it’s unfortunate.

“It is personnel costs, but the work of reaching out to people is a face to face thing we need to interact with people. That’s our job as a homeless office is to sit with people and talk with them, listen to their story, and spend time with them on a face to face basis,” said San Agustin.

With only four employees under OHAPP, including himself, there’s a need for more staff like social workers to operate the homeless shelters in the works.

“We still have our properties that we acquired. So we still have the Anigua apartments that are going to be coming up and that’s planned to be a resource for the homeless on the island and those that need some housing stability. We still do have plans to continue with the bed and night shelter that will be in Tamuning. For the administration, those are things we are putting in place to have a permanent intervention for our homeless on Guam,” San Agustin added.

It should be noted the office was previously funded by American Rescue Plan Act monies.

On the flip side, the largest funded govguam agency is the Guam Department of Education which was allocated $256 million but GDOE Superintendent Dr. Kenneth Swanson told KUAM it's “not sufficient beyond paying salaries of current staff and utilities. maintenance and contracts are not covered.”

This as a handful of schools still await to pass sanitary inspections to reopen for the new school year.
The agency requested $303 million which the superintendent said was the “minimum needed to operate, renew contracts, maintain facilities and increase security.”

Also on Public Safety, the Guam Police Department, the Guam Fire Department, Department of Corrections, and Guam Fire Department were cut in their funding.

Meanwhile, in the Governor’s transmittal letter to Speaker Therese Terlaje, the Magahaga line-item vetoed what she called a “poorly considered, inequitable and counterproductive bonus scheme” for nurses at Guam Memorial Hospital and social workers with Public Health.

The rejected section would have taken nearly half of the appropriations meant for the Hagatna Restoration and Redevelopment Authority to give bonuses to just 10 nurses and 10 social workers.

The governor also expressed her concern with the legislature’s appropriation of nearly $10 million of uncollected excess revenues saying it “threatens to spend our government back into a deficit.”