- Last February, I asked “Who’s the Boss in Utah’s Bears Ears Country?” The following six-part essay, which I’ll post in installments over the next few days, is an attempt to partially answer that question after a year of watching events unfold there.
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| The election of Kenneth Maryboy and Willie Grayeyes to the San Juan County Commission sparked an interest in the way the county is run. (Bill Keshlear) |
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| In 2019, longtime tribal activists Kenneth Maryboy, left, chairman of the San Juan County Commission, and Willie Grayeyes, District 2 commissioner, faced cultural and political fault lines in governing the county. (Bill Keshlear) |
Today
Part 1: Rule by resolution. Kenneth Maryboy and Willie Grayeyes took their oaths of office as commissioners a little under a year ago after what was described as a “historic” election. They immediately staked their claim to power by choosing to govern primarily through resolutions written by their longtime private attorney and approved without advice or informed consent of virtually anyone in the county.
Part 2: The power of environmental nonprofits. It’s hard to overstate the influence of Utah Diné Bikéyah, the tribal-affiliated nonprofit founded and run by Grayeyes and Maryboy until they took office. They’ve succeeded as leaders in attempts to create Bears Ears National Monument in a way that took results of a presidential election and proclamation to derail.
Part 3: Open-records stonewalling. Numerous requests for public records filed under GRAMA were generated in 2019 due in part to the climate created by the new commissioners’ evasiveness and open hostility toward many constituents and those constituents’ forceful, if sometimes rowdy, responses. The county (Grayeyes and Maryboy) was ordered to produce records in three cases.
Part 4: Gutter rhetoric. Unfiltered comments of public figures were part and parcel of 2019’s hard-edged politicking in San Juan County. It was on full display in the weeks and months leading up to November’s special election that asked voters whether they wanted to form a committee to study possible changes in county government.
Part 5: A defeat for good government. A full-court press of a campaign mounted by the San Juan County Democratic Party, its allies and prominent Navajo Nation politicians defeated an ostensibly non-partisan effort to change the way the county works. Results of November’s special election hinged on rhetoric of retribution and the politics of payback. An alternative story line — charting a path toward better democracy — was a non-starter.
Part 6: But can they fix the roads? To a certain extent the new commissioners’ relationship with officials of the Navajo Nation will determine their success in office. They’ve played an insider’s game of reservation politics for a long time, but so far they’ve been unable to leverage that experience into discernible benefits for county residents.
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Part 1: Rule by resolution
By Bill Keshlear
San Juan County, Utah, comprises a splendor of canyons, cliffs and castles of sandstone. Anyone who has made a random discovery of 1,000-year-old artifacts of human habitation, trekked to the top of a Canyonlands National Park overlook at sunset or spent a deathly silent, crystalline night starring at the canopy of Creation can attest to its unearthly beauty.
However, representative government in the county, which will play a critical role in preserving that landscape, seems intractably bogged down by ideological dissembling, undemocratic “outside influences” accountable to no county voter, opaque tribal politics, lawyers and judges making public policy and environmental profiteers.
When Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth Maryboy took their oaths of office as commissioners a little over a year ago, the county, which has voted consistently for conservative candidates over the years, became the first in Utah to have a governing majority of Native Americans. They were longtime liberal activists who played a leading role in a bitter multiyear, multimillion-dollar political campaign to create and now litigate Bears Ears National Monument.
The election was a coup of sorts, the results of which were foreordained by a federal judge who redrew the county’s political lines based on race. It was celebrated by regional and national media as a historical breakthrough in a rural backwater, upending what prominent Salt Lake Tribune columnists Robert Gehrke and Paul Rolly called the county’s “good-old-boys” network. The commissioners’ fellow Democrats at the highest level of the state party fully supported Maryboy and Grayeyes — or at least what many believed they symbolized: representatives of a resurgent national movement to redress historical wrongs and expansion of Native American sovereignty.
The election’s “historic” status so far has survived a legal challenge that alleged Grayeyes was not a resident of Utah and therefore ineligible to hold public office in the state. In a controversial ruling at the end of January, state District Judge Don Torgerson affirmed Grayeyes’ Utah residency because, in part, of the commissioner’s observance of “traditional cultural practices” and that he lives at Navajo Mountain, Utah, more than he does any other place.
The Navajo commissioners aggressively staked claims to power even before they were sworn in by mapping a contingency plan that could’ve “displaced” San Juan’s duly elected county attorney should he challenge their authority.
Over their first few months in office, Maryboy and Grayeyes chose to govern primarily through resolutions written by their longtime Durango, Colorado-based attorney and approved without advice or informed consent of virtually anyone in the county. Demands for transparent and accountable government were stonewalled. As a result, the county was hauled into hearings before the State Records Committee in Salt Lake City and lost.
While mainly symbolic victories for Utah Diné Bikéyah, a Salt Lake City-based tribal-affiliated activist group the new commissioners founded almost a decade ago and ran until they took office, and its allies, votes on the resolutions set a tone for governing that has persisted.
For instance, Kim Henderson, a community activist elected to the Monticello City Council in November, grilled Maryboy in April on whether any public forum had been held to discuss one of numerous resolutions introduced by him over the past two months. He said no. Any input from county residents? No. San Juan County staff consulted? No.
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| Kim Henderson, a community activist who lives in Monticello, attempted in 2019 to hold San Juan County commissioners accountable to their constituents. (Bill Keshlear) |
Her passion was withering. When Maryboy referred to those in attendance at the meeting as “the peanut gallery,” Henderson erupted, “Oh, now, we’re a peanut gallery? I take great offense to what you just said. You just called your constituents the peanut gallery.”
As 2019 drew to a close, the county faced a financial situation that could force an increase in property taxes. It’s a thorny issue because property taxes are not paid on reservation land held in trust by the federal government on behalf of tribes in the United States. Many San Juan Navajos live in Navajo Nation housing on the reservation; they’re, in effect, tenants of a landlord not required to pay property tax.
Any tribal member who owns property off the Navajo reservation – for example, a home or business in Blanding – pays property tax and fees levied by an assortment of state, county, city, and other taxing entities.
But that's probably small consolation among property taxpayers in San Juan County saddled with paying for services in an economy gone sour; or that tribal members currently pay vehicle and assorted fees and sales taxes, gasoline taxes, tourist taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, self-employment taxes, and so on and so forth. Those taxes for the most part don't fill county coffers.
Here’s the rub: Commissioners Maryboy and Grayeyes could raise taxes they themselves possibly would not have to pay.
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Related essays published in the Canyon Country Zephyr
Rhetoric of retribution, the politics of payback (December 2019). https://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/2019/12/01/the-rhetoric-of-retribution-the-politics-of-payback-by-bill-keshlear/
A take-no-prisoners style of politics in San Juan County (October 2019). https://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/2019/09/30/a-take-no-prisoners-style-of-politics-in-san-juan-county-by-bill-keshlear/
My excellent adventure into the heart of Gramaland (June 2019). https://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/2019/06/02/my-excellent-adventure-deep-into-the-heart-of-gramaland-by-bill-keshlear/
A rough transfer of power (June 2019). https://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/2019/06/02/be-it-resolved-five-months-in-a-rough-transfer-of-power-for-san-juan-county-by-bill-keshlear/
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (February 2019). https://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/2019/02/03/meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss-the-san-juan-county-saga-continues-by-bill-keshlear/
Whose county is this anyway (August 2018)? https://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/2018/08/01/whose-county-is-this-anyway-bears-ears-activist-wins-squeaker-for-sjco-commissioner-district-3-what-now-by-bill-keshlear/