New road graders will help reservation roads

Workers from the Navajo Department of Transportation look over road graders that were delivered to the department on Monday. Seven of the massive machines were delivered, which will be used to help with road maintenance through out the Navajo Nation. — © 2008 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Karen Francis
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — The money from the Navajo Nation’s fuel excise tax, which comes from fueling up at gas stations on Navajo, bought new road graders for the Navajo Department of Transportation to maintain and blade roads.

The graders were delivered Monday morning to Window Rock from Mesa, Ariz., and this week, staff from NDOT will be receiving training to operate the Caterpillar 140M machines, which are state-of-the-art and worth more than a $250,000 each.

“There’s a lot of roads out there that are just not maintained well. We’re purchasing these graders to bring them up to our specifications,” Kendall Long of NDOT said.

One of the advantages of the new models is the comfort level that operators will now have thanks to new technology where a steering wheel is not necessary.

“It’s good that our people are getting something that’s well worth it,” Roscoe Tsosie, with the road maintenance program, said. “It’s going to help me to not get too much fatigue.”

A simulator, much like a video game, was available to help staff train to operate the equipment since it contains about 70 percent different content than the previous designs.

“You can’t compare the two but this is how we get them started,” Jacob Fenn from Empire said about the simulator. “As you know, motor graders can be complicated and this can assist in easing that.”

Fenn and three others from Empire were there to teach the road maintenance employees to operate the machines.

Training also includes studying about safety and a session at Blue Canyon Road in Fort Defiance .

Another advantage of the new graders is once the tribe is through with the equipment years down the line, it can now trade them back in.

“Throughout the years, the tribe didn’t get equipment with buy-back issues and what did we get? Dumping grounds for our reservation,” Tsosie said.

Tsosie, along with Melvin Jones and former co-worker Dempsey Claw, were the three original employees hired when NDOT’s road maintenance program began about 4 1/2 years ago. They are also the three that did the research and justification to purchase the equipment.

Tsosie and Jones laughed remembering how they showed up for work when they were first hired and asked where the equipment was only to be told there was none.

Now road maintenance has 20 road graders and 26 employees.

Even with the seven road graders delivered, the need for equipment to maintain Navajo roads is great. With a nation that is similar in size to the state of West Virginia , there are some 13,000 miles of roads and NDOT department manager Tom Platero said about 192 road graders are needed, especially with the plans that NDOT wants to incorporate.

The plan that NDOT is working on, Platero said, is to divide the Navajo Nation into 12 regions to bring services closer to the community rather than having equipment and personnel centralized at the five agencies.

“We’re trying to localize services,” Platero said. “We’re also trying to recruit operators in the community they operate in.”

When the plan is implemented, there will be four substations in each of the 12 regions, Platero said. NDOT will be putting up maintenance yards in Piñon and Dilkon very soon, he added. He said that NDOT got the funding from the Transportation and Community Development Friday.

Furthermore, NDOT wants to 638 the program, allowing for the Navajo Nation to take over Bureau of Indian Affairs roads, which many residents have complained are not well maintained.

“What we’re trying to do is take road fund money and BIA money and create a road maintenance program,” Platero said.

“When we 638, it’s all going to be Navajo Nation employees so if something happens in the community, then we can bring all those resources,” Platero said.

The biggest problem is that BIA has been underfunded for so many years and the federal budget wants to cut the budget in half, Platero said.

Six million dollars to operate a whole maintenance program for the Navajo Nation is not enough, he added. He said it would take around $35-40 million a year for such a program.