Senator hears concerns on Indian Country roads
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POLSON — It’s no revelation to residents of the Flathead Reservation that the roads need improvement, and according to panelists at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Indian reservations across the country are facing similar or worse problems with their roads and bridges.
Federal officials and tribal leaders testified on transportation in Indian Country at a field hearing led by U.S. Senator Jon Tester Friday at the KwaTaqNuk Resort in Polson, where the critical question was how to improve distribution of Indian Reservation roads program funds among tribes.
“The Indian Reservation Road formula is broken,” said Chairman Bud Moran of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. “On the Flathead Indian Reservation in 2006, we received $1.3 million from the formula; in 2010, we will likely receive only $750,000 … I don’t understand how this is possible.”
Moran; James Steele Jr., chairman of the Montana-Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council; Tim Rosette Sr., of the Chippewa-Cree Tribe of the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation; and John Smith, transportation director for Wyoming’s Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes, all said the current method of distributing federal money via the Bureau of Indian Affair’s IRR program isn’t working.
“We’re not able to fix our roads like we used to be able to fix our roads; we’re not able to maintain our roads like we used to be able to maintain our roads,” Rosette said. “We believe that there’s been significant misuse and mismanagement of the (IRR) program.”
And as a result, “the things most Americans take for granted are lacking on our homelands,” Moran said.
The IRR formula allocates transportation funding to tribes based on three main factors: costs to construct roads, vehicle miles traveled and population — a system Steele said is “not fair” and “not equitable.” The reality is, tribal leaders charged, that tribes in urban areas with small land bases and large populations get more funding than they actually need to build and maintain roads, while in the Rocky Mountain region, rural tribes with huge land bases and many more miles of roads to maintain get shortchanged.
“We need to have factors that are very essential to an Indian Reservation way of life,” Smith said, suggesting the money distribution formula should take into account a tribe's land base and road miles.
Not only does the IRR formula not provide for accurate assessment of a tribe’s need, it doesn’t have safeguards to prevent abuse of the system, according to several tribal leaders.
“In addition to on-reservation roads, the formula allows tribes to include roads that ‘access’ the reservation. Unfortunately, access is not defined,” Moran wrote in a statement he submitted to Tester.
Some tribes have gone so far as to include in their road inventories interstate highways with huge vehicle-miles-traveled measurements and roads that could hardly be construed as “accessing” a reservation, he continued.
“Highway 93 crosses our reservation, but just south of our reservation and slightly north of Missoula it intersects I-90,” Moran wrote. “Should we claim (Interstate 90) as accessing our reservation?”
Another issue mentioned throughout the hearing was Question 10, part of a series of questions on the Department of the Interior’s final rule, published in 2004, governing the IRR program. Question 10 addresses whether reservation roads should be fully funded by the federal government — an issue that tribal leaders said is complicated and confusing. Since 2004, the BIA and Federal Highways Administration have been working on a clarification of “Q-10,” and the Committee on Indian Affairs has held 10 consultations with tribal leaders to discuss the issue, Tester said.
He asked the panelists for their reactions to the Question 10 consultations, and the consensus was that “it’s a very complex issue,” as Associate Federal Highways Administrator John Baxter put it.
“The main thing I picked up on was that the funding that’s there is not done in an ethical manner,” Moran said.
“We still have a long way to go in resolving the issues that intertwine with Question 10,” Smith added.
Following the panel discussions, Tester allowed the public to comment on transportation issues, and several tribal leaders from as far away as Arizona shared their concerns.
At a time when the U.S. is spending large amounts to rebuild foreign countries, “as Indian nations we feel that we have given and given and given way too much,” Crow Nation Secretary Scott Russell said. “We feel that it’s about time that the United States government rebuilds Native America.”
“Maybe some of these consultations need to be held in Heart Butte, Montana, where your car would fall apart on a BIA road,” the Blackfeet Nation’s Jay St. Goddard told Tester.
Friday’s hearing was the first Senate committee hearing held on the Flathead Reservation, and had 110 attendees.
“That’s more probably than at any (Washington) D.C. hearing we’ve had in while,” Tester said.
