Life in the dark
18,000 Navajo families without electricity but NTUA positioning for the future

Lenora Malloy lights a lantern in one of the homes on her families property near Summit, Ariz. Malloy and her family have lived in the area all of their lives without electricity. [photo by Brian Leddy / Independent]

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — There are more than 18,000 families without electricity on the Navajo Nation. Navajo Tribal Utility Authority is looking at $20 million in electrification, water and wastewater projects, but there are a few hurdles that have to be overcome before those ever will be realized.

NTUA General Manager Walter W. Haase, who has been in his new position for about seven weeks, recently presented a status report to the Budget and Finance Committee.

“Just looking at one category class — electricity, where we actually provide the most service out of all of our services — we have over 18,000 families without electric service within the Nation today. That’s 75 percent of the (total) folks in the United States who don’t have power or access to electricity.”

“One of NTUA’s major focuses going forward is to provide services to folks who don’t have basic service. Being new to the Nation and not understanding that, that was quite a revelation for me to find out that there are so many folks who live in the Nation here who just don’t have service,” he said.

Navajo families, unplugged

Cassandra Begay, for one, can tell you what it’s like not to have electricity. When three of her children are not away at school, there are six people living in her single-wide mobile home on Defiance Plateau. Begay’s home is just 1 and one-half miles from Arizona Highway 264 where electric transmission lines hang so near, yet so far away.

Beside’s Begay, there are five other families living in close proximity, and none of them have electricity.

“We use kerosene lamps at night and then some of us that can afford it, we have generators for electricity. We run ours for about two or three hours a night. We have a 5,500 watt generator. We kept it in the shack all winter. We kind of kept it covered, so it didn’t freeze up,” she said.

For heat, the family has a wood-burning stove. “We burned wood all winter. For cooking, we have a small propane bottle back here (behind the trailer). It’s connected straight to the propane stove. We use maybe about two bottles a month of propane. In the summer we cook outside.”

Begay said some of her family tried to get electricity to the area in prior years “but they were told that so many families have to be involved.” Now that there are six families in the vicinity, they have just started to try again.

For refrigeration, Begay puts the food outside in cold weather. “Other than that, I go out daily and get some meat. Just like right now — we went out and got some meat, and we have to cook the whole thing today,” she said, pointing to two packages of beef on the kitchen table.

For outside lighting the family has solar lights that she purchased at True Value in Window Rock.

“My grandma’s always saying, ‘How come you guys keep your lights on all night?’” she said, laughing.

St. Michaels /Oak Springs Delegate Curran Hannon told Begay that before electricity was run to his home site on Summit, he used a propane refrigerator.

“A 100-pound bottle lasted about three months,” he said.
Begay pointed toward the wooden shack where the generator is housed. “In the wintertime we were OK with refrigeration. We just stuck them in here and they kept cool. The meat was frozen most of the time. We have portable ice chests that we use in the summertime.”

Asked whether she would like to have electricity, Begay said, “Oh, that would be wonderful!”

Without electricity the family can’t pump water, assuming they had water to pump. As it is, they haul water from the water station in St. Michaels or from the car wash in Window Rock.

“For the winter we’ve been going to the car wash. We didn’t want to get off the road,” she said.

To get electricity, Begay said the families have to go to a chapter planning meeting, then get on the agenda for a chapter meeting and have the community vote on it. “We would go to a chapter meeting on a Sunday and they would pass a resolution asking NTUA to do a feasibility study — that nobody’s saying nothing about lines being run over here,” she said.

Referring to the families living near Begay, Hannon said, “Those people back in there, they’ve been wanting electricity for so long— it’s just that they don’t have the money to get the lines run to them. They’re trying to go through the chapter house to gets resolutions passed.”

If some federal grant money became available to NTUA, it could go a long way to helping those families, he said.

Electrification project

Hasse said NTUA assets totaled $415,817,397 in 2007 while long-term debt stood at $36,562,647.

“That is a very, very low ratio. If you look at most co-ops, they’re at a 50-, 60-, to 70 percent borrowing-to-equity debt ratio. So there is room for us to borrow money in the future,” he said.

Another hurdle for NTUA is overcoming its backlog of work orders, which at one point stood at 3,000. Those now have been reduced to 900.

“That’s the second covenant that you have to have in place, is have your work orders closed out on a regular basis,” Haase said.

The third covenant is that the utility’s assets have to be valued under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission accounting methods, which NTUA’s accounting system currently doesn’t allow for, though NTUA is in the process of updating its system.

“When we are able to pass all three of those hurdles, that will allow us to be able to borrow money from the federal government again under the RUS program,” Haase said.

In 2002, a federal program called the Navajo Electrification Demonstration Project was supposed to provide $85 million in federal funding, or $15 million a year for five years. But as with other federal programs for Navajo, the appropriations didn’t happen.

“Over the first five year-period of time, we got about $8 million,” Haase said. The program later was reauthorized, again for $85 million. “To date, unfortunately, out of that whole program where we needed $85 million, we only received about $10.8 million, and that’s kind of where we stand today.”

With that $10.8 million, NTUA was able to provide hookups for 1,172 families. “That’s a far cry from 18,000; and if we kept going at the pace they’re talking about going in, 100 years from now we still wouldn’t have everyone hooked up.
“If we would have received the grant money, if we were to get $15 million a year, we’d be able to hook up about 1,300 families,” he said.

Under the old program, Navajo did not have to put up any matching funds, however, the new federal program requires a match.“Unfortunately, the organization didn’t realize that when they made the new budget for 2008 earlier in the year, so they didn’t bring forth any matching funds.

“We were under the understanding that the Department of Energy is going to allot $1.9 million ... With a 50 percent match, that means that NTUA now needs to come up with $1.9 million to access those funds, and that wasn’t something that we had anticipated through the process,” Haase said.

There’s a shortage of funding to serve all of the customers NTUA needs to, and because it hasn’t been able to borrow money in the last six years, it has a lot of aging infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt. The recent hike in electric rates will help, but it doesn’t leave NTUA any money to expand the system to the 18,000 families who don’t have service today.

“We’ve kind of evaluated projects from all the agencies and some of the things we looked at was how can we make the most impact — how can we get the most resources in place so that when money becomes available we can hook up as many people as possible.

“We looked at some of the main lines we were running— how many people we can get today off of those lines, and how can we position those lines so that we can build laterals off of them as economically as possible to get to new folks as more money becomes available.

“We’re trying to build ourselves into a situation that it’s not going to take 100 years to take care of these 18,000 families that are out there today. We’re also actively going out and lobbying the federal government to give us more than $1.9 million next year.

“We’re asking for the full $15 million. We don’t think we’ll get the full $15 million, but we believe we will get a lot more than the $1.9 million that we have received for this year,” Haase said.