Delegate aims to shorten Navajo Council sessions

By John Christian Hopkins
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — Delegate Willie Tracey Jr. wants to see Council sessions move along at a swifter pace. To that end, he is sponsoring legislation to allow the Council to debate bills without reading them into the record on the floor.

“I’m trying to fine-tune the process that takes place on the Council floor,” Tracey said.

Some legislation is quite lengthy and takes hours to read in its entirety, Tracey said. But since bills are read into record at the standing committee level, Tracey would like that to be able to substitute for reading it again at Council.

“Some legislation is like a book, and takes hours to read it into the record,” agreed Roscoe Smith, vice chairman of the Ethics & Rules Committee.

Although his bill would let the committee’s reading be sufficient, a delegate could still ask to have the document read on the Council floor, Tracey said.

That request would only require a simple majority vote, he added.
E & R’s Jack Colorado saw merit in Tracey’s legislation.

“It’s taking too much time, reading the new legislation into the record,” Colorado said.

“When you see thick documents being read into the record, you see delegates walking out of the chambers,” E & R Chairman Francis Redhouse said. “In some instances on the 20th Council, the entire document was never read into record because we lost a quorum.”

Delegate George Arthur is working on legislation along the same lines, committee member Tim Goodluck said.

“I don’t know if you were aware of that,” Goodluck said.

Tracey said he would compare his bill to Arthur’s to see if they overlapped.

Tracey’s legislation passed, 4-1.