Interior wants to cut tribal road maintenance funds
Navajo Route 8066 from Rough Rock to Black Mesa has been No. 1 on the Transportation and Community Development Committee's priority list for the last 10 years, according to Delegate Amos Johnson. Due to weather conditions, the road is now nearly impassable. [File photo]

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — The Navajo Nation could face a 50 percent reduction in road maintenance funds if the Department of the Interior’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget request for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ road maintenance is approved.

Navajo Nation Council Delegate Samson Begay told the Intergovernmental Relations Committee Tuesday that DOI plans to reduce BIA Navajo Area funding from $26 million to $13 million, based on the argument that SAFETEA-LU transportation authorization allows up to 25 percent of the Indian Reservation Roads, or IRR, construction funds to be used for road maintenance activities.

IGR approved a Navajo Nation position statement presented by Begay expressing strong opposition to the plan.

Section 1119 (i) of SAFETEA-LU — the “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users” — states that BIA “shall continue to retain primary responsibility, including annual funding request responsibility, for road maintenance programs on Indian reservations.”

The position statement claims that by reducing the IRR Program, DOI would be in violation of retaining primary responsibility for road maintenance — a responsibility of BIA and not U.S. Department of Transportation.

The Nation also claims Congress did not intend to allow IRR Program construction funds to supplement road maintenance funding, based on the last sentence in Section 1119 (i), which states that funding made available under this subsection “is supplementary to and not in lieu of any obligation of funds by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for road maintenance programs on Indian reservations.”

“The reduction from $26 million to $13 million would reduce Navajo’s share to $3 million,” Begay said. “If this happens there is going to be a reduction of road maintenance operations on Navajo by 50 percent. We’re going to lose or lay off approximately 35 of our Navajo work force from the Road Maintenance program.”

He said the Nation’s Transportation and Community Development Committee will be going to Washington March 31-April 4 to lobby against the FY09 budget cuts.

The number of fatal motor vehicle crashes on Indian Reservation roads increased 52 percent between 1975 and 2002, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, compared with a 2.2 percent decrease in auto fatalities for the rest of the United States.

It is Navajo’s position that the reduction in the FY09 budget “will place the Nation and the general traveling public at an extremely high safety risk. This is especially true for all school buses that travel the unpaved roads throughout the Navajo Nation. This, in turn, would place a higher liability toward more accidents involving children ...”

Begay said TCDC and Navajo DOT have undertaken a road inventory.

“Our road construction funding had decreased to $43 million, but when we did the first phase of the inventory, it increased our road funding back up to $69 million.

“Right now there are new roads that are being added this year to the road inventory. These monies that are beginning to come in, some of those portions are uncommitted monies, and those are the monies that we have said that we would give to New Mexico as part of our commitment to (U.S. Highway) 491,” Begay said.

Delegate George Arthur said, “We continue to pursue taking over federal responsibilities. As far as maintaining a budget and getting federal monies and leaving it at a level that would meet our needs, we don’t have that. It’s a political barrier that we can’t overcome. We may consider ourselves the biggest Indian tribe in the country, but politically, we don’t have a big stick to swing in D.C., and yet we continue to do these things.

“I took a hard position against Navajo wanting to contribute to 491, but we did that. We took part of our own pot and we gave it to the state entity that is responsible for maintaining and caring for their own roads.

“What are we going to be saying, ‘We need more dollars because we have more roads to build’ ... and yet at the same time we’re giving our money to the state over here? I really believe that we have to evaluate a lot closer and a lot better when we take on federal responsibilities ... I’m very leery about how we proceed here.”