PSC heading to Washington
Committee members to lobby for funding of law enforcement

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — The Navajo Nation Public Safety Committee will head to Washington, D.C., next week to lobby support for increased funding for law enforcement as the federal budget process kicks into full swing.

President Bush must submit a comprehensive budget to Congress on or before the first Monday in February, and PSC will be looking for Navajo's share.

"We want Navajo earmarks, we want overall program funding increases, and support for fair funding," PSC Chairperson Hope MacDonald-LoneTree told the committee Tuesday as she gave new members a crash course on the basic stages of the congressional budget process.

MacDonald-LoneTree and Benjamin Curley are the only two PSC members from the 20th Navajo Nation Council to return to the committee with the 21st Council.

New members include Rex Lee Jim, formerly with Judiciary Committee, and freshmen delegates Kee Yazzie Mann, Elmer P. Begay, Raymond Joe, and Edmund Yazzie, vice chair. Joe and Yazzie have law enforcement backgrounds.

No rationale
The Bureau of Indian Affairs currently has no funding formula to go by when it carves up its piece of the federal budget pie among Indian tribes, according to MacDonald-LoneTree.

"They just say, 'We're giving the Choctaws $10 million; oh, Navajo, you get $2 million; Oneidas, you get $5 million.' "

"It's indiscriminate right now," she said. "We're asking for a funding formula."

BIA distributes its funds based on historical precedent. Navajo and others have been working on some factors that might go into a BIA funding formula, including on-reservation population, land area, crime rate, economic conditions and tribal police resources.

With a BIA funding formula based on those factors, Navajo could do well for itself.

Based on the 2000 Census, which did not include Alaskan and Hawaiian Natives, the on-reservation Indian population totaled 511,000 for all Natives. Navajo made up 175,000 of that total, or 34.2 percent.

Navajo land area amounts to 21.4 percent of Indian Country. The Nation also is believed to have one of the highest crime rates. Navajo economic development is 50 percent worse than the Indian Country average and its police resources are one-fifth of average.

In FY 2006, BIA's Public Safety funding for all of Indian Country totaled more than $209 million. If a BIA funding formula had been applied based on on-reservation population (34.2 percent), Navajo would have been entitled to more than $71 million. Instead, Navajo received $20 million, or 10.75 percent.

MacDonald-LoneTree said PSC also will be asking members of Congress and Bush's Cabinet to support a new initiative to build detention facilities across Indian Country.

"The White House is important for us, even for those who don't like Bush. The White House will always be important because they set the budget.

"We want President Bush to know that we need jails in Indian Country, specifically Navajo. We want a fulfillment of the federal trust responsibility," she said.

You snooze, you lose
At the same time, Navajo needs to be on top of its own needs and not let funding opportunities pass by.
MacDonald-LoneTree recounted a problem that arose with the 2005 funding for Public Safety.

"In '05 we got an $11 million increase (from BIA) that the committee worked very hard for ... for law enforcement and detention," she said. "We sat down with BIA and said, 'Look we need that money.' BIA told us, 'All we need is a letter and we need a budget from you.'

"We came back, we told the division that we have a short timetable here, there's $11 million available for the Navajo Nation for our needs." But what happened, she said, "is the division did not submit that budget or proposal to BIA until a third of the fiscal year went by, and at that time they only asked for $300,000 of that whole $11 million."

That kind of lack of effort hurts what PSC is trying to accomplish in "the big picture" for Public Safety, MacDonald-LoneTree said.

"In the end, we only ended up with $600,000 of that $11 million and that was halfway through the fiscal year. The BIA director told me he could not hold onto it. If these agencies hold onto their money, Congress penalizes them, OMB penalizes them.

"They've got to spend their money so they're showing there's a need out there, too. BIA had to get rid of that money and give it to other tribes," she said. "Now, we are going to go back and have to justify somehow that there's still a need, that there was a miscommunication or whatever it was, that we need to continue to press forward with increases in our budget," she said.

Unmet needs
"This kind of effort really does require a lot of close work with our division here to make sure that they are moving along with us, and we are moving along with them, and meeting the needs of our people," MacDonald-LoneTree said.

"So we lost out on about $10.4 million?" Raymond Joe said.

"Yes, that was given out to other tribes," MacDonald-LoneTree told him.

Kee Yazzie Mann asked, "How can we lose $10.4 million?"

MacDonald-LoneTree told him, "Because that's all you ask for. There was $11 million that was available. President Bush put in a cut and it went to about $10 million; and knowing that there's $10 million there, Navajo submitted a proposal saying all we need for all of Navajo is $300,000. That's how we lose that funding."

Mann told the committee that a professor at Diné College failed to submit a budget proposal for $100,000. "The board came back and told him to leave. That $100,000 is way less than $10.4 million, but he lost his job."

Eighty percent of the Public Safety budget comes from federal funding.

"If we lose that, if we fail to do a proposal, that's a huge chunk. Our services could be shut down," MacDonald-LoneTree said. "Obviously this committee would never let that happen, but we need to make sure that we're keeping up as we go along."

She told the committee, "As you guys become more knowledgeable of the federal budget process, how it interfaces and how it affects our budget, you'll see how important it is that we need to meet these deadlines."