PR firm asks grant recipients to lie

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The public relations firm working for a uranium mining company seeking the county’s rich reserves has asked the recipient of a company grant to lie about being misquoted by The Independent. The recipient has refused.

Angie Holtsoi, program coordinator for the local office of ChildSight, was thrilled when she found out that Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI) approved its grant application two months ago. It was part of a new Community Fund the company had just started to help local non-profits addressing youth, health, environmental and economic development issues. For a group trying to help the community’s vision-impaired children on $150,000 a year, Holtsoi said, the $10,000 grant was “going to really help.”

In an article The Independent published June 21, Holtsoi also said that she’d found the grant application “weird,” because it was less involved than most, and that she didn’t know exactly what it was that HRI did. The application says nothing. When Holtsoi found out that the company mines uranium, the program director said she suddenly had “second thoughts” about accepting the money and would discuss the grant with her supervisor.

ChildSight ended up taking the money. But according to Holtsoi, that didn’t stop DW Turner, the company HRI hired to publicize and run the grant program, from asking her to write The Independent a letter to the editor claiming she’d been misquoted. DW Turner even wrote the letter for her.

Not long after the article appeared in the paper, Holtsoi received a call from Laurie Falconer, a Turner employee. According to Holtsoi, “she said she would put something together and can you send it to The Independent?”

Not knowing what Falconer had in mind, she agreed. But when the e-mail arrived, Holtsoi did not like what she read.

“It’s telling me I lied about what I said,” Holtsoi said, and that she was “disappointed” in the article. She couldn’t bring herself to turn it in.

“It wasn’t true,” Holtsoi said of the letter. “I know what I said.”

DW Turner tells a very different story.

Falconer said she left it to the grant recipients to decide whether or not to submit the letters she’d drafted for them and declined further comment.

But in an e-mail to The Independent, Kristin Jensen, a Turner account executive, claims that Holtsoi told the firm she was misquoted in the article. It was only then, Jensen adds, that Turner suggested she write a letter to the editor.

“In light of the June 21, 2007, article, DW Turner reached out to the grant recipients as community partners to ensure that their interests and integrity were being protected,” she writes.

Holtsoi told The Independent she was not misquoted. To date, she has not written the newspaper a letter to the editor.

But Ken Garcia has.

The director of the Crownpoint Wellness Center, another grant recipient, Garcia was not quoted in the June 21 article. But after it appeared, he got a call from a woman who asked him to submit a letter about the program to The Independent. He received the letter, a generic paragraph about how grateful the center was for the money, and submitted it word for word. It ran July 7.

Garcia could not recall the name of the woman or whether she was with Turner or HRI, but said she called from Albuquerque, where Turner is based. HRI has its offices in Crownpoint.

Mary Patten, director of development for the Gallup Crisis Pregnancy Center, yet another grant recipient, also found a suggested letter to the editor waiting in her e-mail account after the June 21 article. She’s still deciding whether to submit it.

HRI declined to comment for this story. Company president Craig Bartels was happy to unveil the grant program in an April 27 news release, though.

“Initiatives that aim to benefit local residents are the cornerstone of a community’s well-being,” he said. “As a member of the local community, we just want to do our part to ensure the long-term success of these valuable programs.”

HRI has been trying to mine in McKinley County, just beyond the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation, for decades now. Opposition from local grassroots groups and the tribe itself, which banned uranium mining on Navajoland in 2005, have slowed it down. HRI insists its properties sit on private land, but a recent ruling by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency labeling the land Indian country could bring the tribe’s ban into play.

The Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining say the grant program is a sign that HRI is “running scared.”

“They’re just trying to buy out the community,” said ENDAUM’s Lynnea Smith. “Now that the heat is being turned on, they’re doing something about it.”