Opponents: Casinos a bad bet
Group says gaming legislation gives away the farm

Residents who live in Churchrock may soon see a new casino. A group headed by former Navajo Nation President Milton Bluehouse announced their opposition to the casino loan Wednesday. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

KAYENTA, Ariz. — Are the Navajo people willing to pawn the Nation’s assets to secure $100 million to develop a casino?

In essence, that is what the Navajo Nation Council is being asked to do if it approves legislation authorizing the issuance of general obligation bonds and JPMorgan Chase Bank to provide bond financing for gaming, according to a group of present and former Navajo Nation leaders and concerned citizens.

Former Navajo Nation President and Vice President Milton Bluehouse, former Chairman Peter MacDonald, Kayenta Town Manager Daniel Peaches, law student Ivan Gamble of LeChee, Vern Lee of Fruitland, Gibson Jones of Tuba City, and others met Wednesday in Kayenta to discuss the legislation with financial experts, and afterward held a news conference to outline concerns.

The council is meeting today in a special work session to become better educated on the terms and conditions advanced in the legislation. A special session to consider its passage has been proposed for Friday.

Gamble said that when he began reading the legislation, it made him sick. “There are two scary things in here. One, the President’s Office has direct control over all the paperwork, so there is no accountability, no checks and balances over this.”

Also, he said, it takes Council completely out of the process and keeps the Executive Branch — the attorney general, the controller and the president — as the signees. “It is a $100 million discretionary fund available to the president at will for Capital Improvement Projects,” according to Gamble.

Wording
The way the legislation is worded, “all the Navajo Nation president has to do is classify anything as a Capital Improvement Project to be able to spend the money. It’s the next administration that has to figure out how to pay for this, and the next one. He’s just like a kid with a credit card. He’s the only one that has to sign off, and we pay the bill,” Gamble said.

Other language of concern states that “Council hereby ratifies and approves all actions previously taken by the President, the Controller and the Attorney General to obtain the gaming loan ... ”

“We don’t know what they’ve done so far. They might have a serious conflict of interest with this whole process, but then we’ve given them the right to have done that. It’s really, really creepy,” Gamble said. “This is a power grab and it’s a money thing. The Council is supposed to be the ones with the power of the checkbook.

“This delineates them from that process and gives the president his own direct line of credit, $100 million, to do with as he pleases. He’s never been able to get the money from the Council before; this way, he removes the Council entirely from the process, the money stays his. The last point is that all things are superseded by this law,” Gamble said.

Former Chairman MacDonald said he has a lot of questions regarding the legislation. “Many of those questions will require some time to get answers. To move forward in a real hasty manner without having those questions answered or defined would be a move in a direction of putting the Navajo Nation in a position that we may feel sorry about in the future,” he said.

“It has far-reaching consequences when you begin to pledge the entire assets of the Navajo Nation just for $100 million. The language that’s found in this document all favors JPMorgan and the lenders that JPMorgan may bring to the table — and it protects JPMorgan and the lenders. It holds them harmless for anything that they may do or don’t do.

“The language that protects Navajo and protects the Navajo Nation’s assets is not in here; at least, I don’t find any. As a matter of fact, it even goes to the point of allowing JPMorgan to be in charge of our assets. We cannot pledge it, we cannot use it without first running it by and getting approval from JPMorgan.

“We’ve been trying to get out of a situation similar to that. BIA, for over 100 years has held that kind of position, and we’ve been working very, very hard to unchain ourselves from that kind of dictatorship over our affairs.

“Now we’re giving it to JPMorgan and on top of that, pledging our assets into the future and putting future generations in long-term debt after the present leadership moves on,” he said. “I believe it’s important for our leaders to take a real good look at this before they vote on it to approve it.”

Input needed?
MacDonald said he believes Council should continue to table the legislation until it has more input. “There’s nothing wrong with going out to the people and saying, ‘Look, let’s pawn our entire assets for the $100 million, do you want to do this or not?’ And get it from the people. If the majority or all of the people within the Navajo Nation agree to do this, well, maybe we’ll do it.

“But if the Navajo Nation stakeholders are not informed properly and they’re not part of this movement to get this indebtedness, then we’re going to face serious problems in the future. I know there is a need for economic development, and for that reason, I’m sure many of our leaders want to get a casino going as soon as possible.

“Well, you can have a casino many other ways than this particular method, and I’m sure if you go around and talk to financial industries, they’ll tell you a number of less costly ways to start a casino than this method here,” MacDonald said.

Former President Milton Bluehouse said, “Every penny that the Navajo Nation has, the Navajo people are shareholders. Any shareholders that I know of throughout the world would always want to know just exactly how that money is being used and involved. So in this case, if there’s anything that’s going to happen, they always have some kind of election, like for increasing the tax.”

Bluehouse said he learned about the plan Sept. 5 when he saw the headline in a local newspaper. “I thought, what’s going on here? I’m a shareholder. Why didn’t the Navajo Nation government inform everybody throughout the Navajo Nation?

“It belongs to people out at the sheep camp, or a single mother wheeling a little child along the highway in a stroller, or a grandma out there that may have nothing to eat that evening. This is our money, and it should be used for beneficial use, rather than doling it out to all of these large bankers and somebody that can take advantage of us.”

Bluehouse and Gamble said they believe the Nation could get a better deal by working with international banks.

Kayenta’s Peaches said the Navajo people have had some good leaders in years past, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. “I look at those leaders, and they looked to the experts — financial experts, legal experts, all aspects — before they made a decision,” he said.

“The discussion in the Council was ‘What is best for the Navajo people?’ and they always based it on ‘What is good for our grandchildren?” But in the 1980s and 1990s, “the leadership at Window Rock level changed from doing things for the Navajo people to a ‘What’s in it for me?’ type of mentality,” Peaches said.

“This is part of that whole thing, and this is very unfortunate. I’m hoping that young people like Mr. Gamble will come out and take us back to the time when leaders, the decision they made, was what’s best for our people and our grandchildren. That’s the kind of decision that our leaders should be making,” he said.

Like a ‘bad parent’
Vern Lee, a mechanic from Fruitland, compared the legislation and its legacy to “an analogy of the bad parent.”

“The parent is taking milk away from the baby. The parent is satisfying himself while the baby is losing weight. So I ask the Council, I petition all of them, not to damage our future, and to vote no on this legislation,” he said.

Lee said that in the late ’80s there was a $100 million bond proposal that was about to go through before MacDonald was ousted. “The collateral on that was based on the royalties that were being produced with Black Mesa. No assets were put up for collateral. It was just based on the royalties that were recorded as being made and what was projected in the future.”

Gamble said that according to the legislation, the Nation will pay $1 million in interest the first year on the $100 million loan. “Even if we do nothing the first year, we still pay $1 million — $250,000 on a quarterly basis just to have a line of credit secured. ... We can find better deals.

“What they also said was they only looked in Indian Country for banks. They did not look at going to international banks ... that have lots more savvy and a lot better interest rates, reflecting the American dollar on the international market.

“We’re putting ourselves to the most expensive one, the London Index, just because that was what JPMorgan dictated. It’s poor financing at that point,” he said.