- 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.
 |
| Road conditions on the reservation strip of San Juan County can be life-threatening. The Navajo Nation claimed ownership of the roads in 2007 and gradually phased-out its relationship with San Juan County to provide maintenance. (Governing) |
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.
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?
 |
| The success of Navajo activists Kenneth Maryboy and Willie Grayeyes (pictured here with Sally Jewell, President Obama'a secretary of Interior) in lobbying to create Bears Ears National Monument hinged on cultivating allies with power and money, including national environmental groups and the Navajo Nation. As the new commissioners enter their second year in office, will those same groups help out in a more mundane local agenda – such as fixing the roads in the small, impoverished rural county in southeastern Utah? |
By Bill Keshlear
To a certain extent the new San Juan County commissioners’ relationship with officials of the Navajo Nation will determine their success in office. After all, who best to stand up for the rights and interests of individual Navajos in San Juan than Kenneth Maryboy and Willie Grayeyes? They’ve played an insider’s game of reservation politics for a long time.
However, the new commissioners so far have not been able to leverage that experience into discernible benefits for county residents. Lots of talk about holding on to their language and culture and support of environmental policy at the expense of jobs in the oil patch. But no vision of sustainable economic development. Nothing about improving public health or providing household water and electricity to those in need. Nothing about collaborative law enforcement with the Navajo Nation.
Not unlike what seems to be emerging among many of his San Juan County constituents, Commissioner Maryboy has had rocky relationships over the years with power players in Window Rock, Arizona, the seat of Navajo Nation government.
He was a delegate to the tribe’s legislative body, the Navajo Nation Council, a San Juan County commissioner and officer of Utah Diné Corporation in 2009 when he testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 2009.
(Others on the trip to Washington, D.C., were Kenneth Maryboy’s brother, Mark, Davis Filfred, now board chair of Utah Diné Bikéyah, and Phil Lyman, now San Juan’s representative in the Utah House of Representatives.)
Maryboy wanted the Utah Navajo Trust Fund, which was set up by Congress in 1933 so Utah Navajos would benefit from Aneth oil and gas royalties, to be administered by his Utah Diné Corporation instead of the Navajo Nation and the state of Utah.
He believed that given the Navajo Nation’s history of “neglect, unaccountability and malfeasance,” it lacked the capacity to administer the fund.
“San Juan County believes that the Navajo Nation government, which is located in Window Rock, Arizona, and provides few if any government services to Utah Navajos, does not have the best interest of Utah Navajos at heart when it asserts a vague argument of tribal sovereignty to wrestle away control of the Utah Navajo Trust Fund from Utah Navajos.
“The Navajo Nationʼs heretofore disinterest in its own members who reside within the Utah strip of the Navajo Nation is the very reason why San Juan County has stepped up to the plate to deliver essential government services to Utah Navajos. San Juan County has provided law enforcement, fire protection, emergency medical services, senior services, road maintenance, telecommunication and water services to the seven Utah Navajo chapters because the tribe in Window Rock does not.”
Maintenance of roads owned by the Navajo Nation in San Juan County is a problem both Maryboy and former San Juan County Commissioner Rebecca Benally know about first-hand as Navajos on the reservation. Benally narrowly lost to Maryboy in the June 2018 Democratic primary.
“Mostly composed of dirt, they’re treacherous in good weather and frequently impassable after heavy rains or snows. In 2015, San Juan County canceled 10 days of classes in a single semester because of poor road conditions. Heavy ambulances must stop where roads are flooded and wait for passersby with four-wheel drive to ferry paramedics and equipment to their patients. People who need chronic medical attention, like kidney dialysis, often miss their appointments. And it’s hard for people to get to work in far-off towns,” according to a description published in the online edition Governing magazine.
Benally tried to make road improvement a priority, but didn’t get far. One reason, she says, echoing Maryboy’s stinging testimony, is that little of the federal highway money that flows to the Navajo Nation, which decides where to spend it, goes to the Utah strip of the reservation.
For the past few years, the Arizona-based tribal transportation department hasn’t approved a single major road improvement project in Utah, and its current five-year plan doesn’t include one either, according to Governing.
“There is funding,” Benally said. “It just doesn’t reach Utah, especially on the reservation.”
In interviews after he was sworn-in, Maryboy seemed unfamiliar with county finances and intent on scapegoating his predecessors, whom left San Juan County saddled with bills for litigation. The pot of money could be replenished once those suits were settled, he said.
In an economy spiraling downward (along with related tax revenue), it was pure fantasy.
Of the 627 miles of road on the Utah side of the reservation, Benally wanted to prioritize the 87 miles of school bus routes that are still unpaved and upgrade them at least to gravel. That would’ve cost roughly $18 million. The county’s total annual budget is in the ballpark of $12 million.
Maryboy described the Navajo Nation’s justification of its attempt to “wrestle” control of the Utah Navajo Trust Fund from Utah Navajos as “a vague argument of tribal sovereignty” in his 2009 Senate testimony. But the description seemed just as relevant two years earlier when it claimed ownership of reservation roads within the county (and, presumably, responsibility for maintenance).
“In 2012, the Navajo Nation Council passed N.N.C. 2 500 (C) (6) which gave all responsibility over transportation to Navajo Division of Transportation,” according to a remarkable letter sent to Utah Navajo chapter officials by county commissioners Phil Lyman, Rebecca Benally and Bruce Adams a couple of months before the landmark 2018 election.
The political rhetoric embraced at the time by Grayeyes, Maryboy, John Courage Singer (a Navajo who was running for Congress) and news media was rife with accusations targeting San Juan officials as negligent in providing services on the reservation. Road maintenance or lack thereof became a symbol of incompetence, possibly racism. Based on the letter from commissioners to chapter officials – several of whom were intimately involved in campaigns to elect the three Navajos on the ballot – the charges were misguided.
Leaders at all levels of government and partisan stripe have drafted numerous plans over the years to build better roads and upgrade infrastructure on the reservation. But confusion over jurisdictions and an absolute embrace of the kind of tribal sovereignty Maryboy criticized (Naomi Schaefer Riley in “The New Trail of Tears” likens it to a politically correct straitjacket) have consistently stymied progress across the country on improving reservation schools, economies, housing, social and environmental conditions, law enforcement and, yes, road conditions.
The latest attempt to leap the barrier that prevents road construction and maintenance in San Juan County came on October 2 when a group of elected officials – including the president of the Navajo Nation and the county’s representative in Congress – came together in Blanding and talked about reservation roads.
It was a positive step toward solving a seemingly intractable problem – or at least developing the positive political relationships needed to move the process forward. Grayeyes was front and center; Maryboy, literally and figuratively, was not in the picture.
 |
| From left, state Rep. Phil Lyman, Albert Holiday, Oljato chapter of the Navajo Nation, Bruce Adams, San Juan County commissioner, Jonathan Nez, president of the Navajo Nation, John Curtis, U.S. congressman, Willie Grayeyes, San Juan County commissioner, Joe B. Lyman, Blanding mayor, Logan Monson, Blanding city councilman, Cheryl Bowers, Blanding city councilwoman, and Bayley Hedglin, Monticello city councilwoman. |
__________
Related essays published by 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/