- Last February, I asked “Who’s the Boss in Utah’s Bears Ears Country?” The following six-part essay, which I've been posting in installments, is an attempt to partially answer that question after a year of watching events unfold there. This is part 5.
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| A yard sign-style campaign message of the San Juan County Democratic Party on Highway 262 just inside the Aneth extension of the Navajo Nation was modified in advance of a special election on Nov. 5. The signs were positioned along highways in the southern part of the county. (Bill Keshlear) |
Part 1: Rule by resolution. Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth Maryboy took their oaths of office as commissioners a little over 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 overestimate 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.
TODAY
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 5: A defeat for good government
By Bill Keshlear
A full-court press of a campaign by the San Juan County Democratic Party, its allies and prominent Navajo Nation politicians won the day by 192 of 4,160 votes cast in November's special election and killed an ostensibly non-partisan effort to change the way the county works.
Results broke along partisan and racial lines. Mostly Navajo and Democratic precincts voted overwhelmingly against the ballot question while mostly Anglo and Republican precincts voted for it. Liberals in Bluff’s Precinct 10 overwhelmingly voted against it, unlike other liberals up north. A pocket of San Juan County residents just south of Moab, Precinct 1, voted overwhelmingly for the proposition. They conceivably had much to gain if the proposition had been approved. It eventually could’ve led to creation of a district closer to them geographically (and philosophically) than the one in which they currently live.
Defeat of Proposition 10 hinged on rhetoric of retribution and the politics of payback. An alternative story line — charting a path toward better democracy — was a non-starter. Not one media outlet published a news account of ways other forms of government possibly could’ve fostered a structure in which each vote would count equally toward election results.
Obstacles to creation of an equitable representative democracy in San Juan could now be insurmountable because of the special election and U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby’s December 2017 ruling in Navajo Nation vs. San Juan County, a landmark voting rights case. The decision was upheld on appeal in July.
Shelby — or more accurately, Shelby and his “special master,” Bernard Grofman, a University of California Irvine political scientist — gerrymandered the county to solve the problem of federally approved districts that had been allowed to devolve over the years to the extent that they prevented Navajos from a fair chance of winning seats on the county commission and school board.
(According to The Salt Lake Tribune’s account of the 10th Circuit Court’s decision that upheld Shelby’s ruling, Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, who represented the county in the case, argued that the county did not have the authority to substantially alter voting districts because of a 1984 consent decree under which commissioners were elected by district rather than at large. Judge Nancy Moritz acknowledged that county officials may have “subjectively believed” they did not have the authority to alter district boundaries, but said those beliefs were based on a mistaken interpretation of the consent decree. “We relied very heavily on the county clerk,” County Commissioner Bruce Adams said of the districts the commission approved in 2011, “and it was our belief based on the information we got from the clerk [and the clerk’s interpretation of the consent decree] that we could not change those districts.”)
Shelby and Grofman packed and stacked and sliced and diced, creating grotesquely apportioned county commission districts: Grayeyes’ District 2 has a Native American population of 65 percent; Maryboy’s District 3, 79 percent; and Adams’ District 1, 11 percent.
Ironically, liberal Anglos of Spanish Valley, an area of rapid population expansion in San Juan County just south of Moab, now find themselves locked into one of the most conservative county districts in Utah, Adams’ district. A group of them attended a county Democratic Party rally at the Mexican Water, Arizona, Navajo Nation chapter two days before the election and enthusiastically supported what in effect was their disenfranchisement.
They might take comfort in the fact that after a year in office, Maryboy and Grayeyes have adopted roles as proxy representatives of Spanish Valley. The two Navajo commissioners can override any initiative of Adams, and have. They can meet with Grand County officials on San Juan business without Adams’ knowledge or consent, and have. They can exclude Adams from any policy or employment decision, including hiring an interim county administrator, and have.
Speakers at the rally represented a who’s who of San Juan County Democratic Party politics and current and former leaders of the Navajo Nation and Utah chapters. Parked on patches of sand outside the chapter house were newish and pricey 4x4s. Most drivers of those vehicles were not among the long-term unemployed or suffering the ravages of the reservation’s diabetes pandemic or any of the other Third World social and economic dysfunctions endemic to life on the reservation.
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| Davina Smith, a canvasser for the San Juan County Democratic Party and former staffer at the tribal-affiliated activist nonprofit Utah Dine Bikeyah, spoke at a rally two days before November's special election at the Navajo Nation chapter in Mexican Water, Arizona. The event was moderated by Davis Filfred, chair of Utah Dine Bikeyah, and hosted by the Navajo Nation. (Bill Keshlear) |
The county Democrats unabashedly played religion as well as race cards to energize party faithful, many of whom drove several hours to attend the rally. The whole ballot initiative was concocted to deny Navajos their rightful place in positions of power, several speakers said.
Grayeyes, who arguably won a seat on the commission because of Shelby’s ruling, said he could not figure out who was responsible for the ballot question, but then he suggested leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormon Republicans at the local, state and even national levels could’ve played a role. Possibly even President Trump. Trump a Mormon? The partisan crowd chuckled. It was red-meat stuff.
Mark Maryboy echoed his inflammatory comments of several months earlier. He said Mormons were “innately mean.” He linked the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre and the then-governance of Brigham Young, considered a prophet by many members of the LDS Church, to racial animosity unabated over the decades; that’s what drove creation of the ballot question.
“It boils down to racism against Navajos,” said Charlaine Tso, delegate of Utah chapters to the Navajo Council, who was quoted in a Navajo Times story, “as well as wanting to divide the county lines and adding more commissioners so the Navajo commissioners won’t have overall power to say-so.”
Any eventual change brought about in good faith through Proposition 10 across ideological and partisan lines could’ve fostered a sense of electoral fairness among all county residents — a crucial ingredient in bridging San Juan’s monumental cultural and political divide and successful governance.
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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/