Chris Deschene: Old Wine, New Bottles 1. Is Chris Deschene new hope for the Navajo Nation? Many younger Navajos are putting their hopes and wishes in Chris Deschene as an alternative to the status quo politics of Window Rock (forgetting the real limitations of the Office of the President in the Navajo Nation). But what Deschene suggests is that not every change is potentially a good change. His presidential run is about replacing the naatanni rhetoric of Shelly and Shirley for technocratic rule, based on supposed “qualifications.” Deschene represents a new class of political leadership, one that is conditioned in the conservative bastions of Phoenix and Page, AZ and looking to transform the Navajo Nation into a more efficient partner to Arizona energy interests. Deschene has taken short sighted and politically opportunistic positions on nearly every consequential issue that has faced the Navajo Nation for much of the last decade. These issues are ones that would affect the Navajo Nation for years and ones that he helped to rush on the Navajo public without adequate debate and dialog. The issues were the proposed Desert Rock power plant outside of the community of Burnham in 2006, the proposed Little Colorado River Settlement in 2012, and the purchase of the Navajo Mine in 2013. There might be others, but this already is a sizeable sample. I will address some dynamics of BHP Navajo Mine purchase and SB2109, but there is much more to say about all of these things. 2. Navajo Mine purchase Let’s look at eastern coal first. There is a structural and political difference between coal mining on Black Mesa and coal mining outside of Farmington. The main difference is that although a relatively large provider of jobs, coalmining in the eastern end of the Navajo reservation is more environmentally damaging and is no longer profitable. This is the likely reason for why BHP wanted to close the mine in the first place. It probably anticipated tightening EPA regulations from the Obama White House that would make coal fired power plants more costly to operate and less likely to continue in operation. With power plants buying less coal, the profitability of the mine sinks and continuing its operations is no longer desirable. But opportunists in the Navajo Nation government put on rose-colored glasses and ignored the political and economic reality of coal in this part of the Navajo Nation. Where BHP was trying to shed an unprofitable mine, opportunists jumped to “own” something large, complicated, and expensive in the name of “tribal sovereignty.” Along these lines, Deschene is quoted in a High Country News article from this year saying: “What the Nation is doing is saying no. We’re going to own the mine and we’re going to (make more than) cents on the dollar. To me that is not dependency, but rather being independent and exercising a measure of sovereignty for the benefit of your people.” This statement is both misleading and short sighted. It’s misleading because owning a mine doesn’t change the nature of the mine’s relationship with the power plants and regional utilities. The mine is the most obvious, but least profitable rung on the coal commodity chain. Where the real money is made is in utilities. The only way to change the dynamic where the Navajo Nation is not dependent on coal (or any other form of energy production) is not to own a mine, or a power plant, but a utility company. I’m not advocating for it, but stating it as a matter of fact. The Navajo Nation won’t be free of dependency until it gets to the level of APS, SRP, or PNM. His simplistic reading of the scenario fails to address this and leads us down a dangerous path. Instead, it relies on the familiarity Navajo people have in being exploited in coal leases. The consequence of this folly is that the Navajo Nation is now burdened with the responsibility and liabilities that come with the Navajo Mine, a liability previously held by the mining company BHP. Deschene has supported a position that has increased the Navajo Nation’s risk to suit on multiple fronts, from the individual miner who is injured at the mine site to the environmental organization or state entities who suit the mine for environmental contamination. All of these risks were held by BHP until we bought the mine through a thinly disguised front company, NTEC, in 2013. Our attorney general Harrison Tsosie said that the Navajo Transitional Energy Corporation (NTEC) cannot be sued for any of these liabilities because it has inherited the sovereign immunity of the Navajo Nation as a creature of the Navajo Nation, but this declaration on part of Tsosie hasn’t been tested in court and rests on shaky logic that I suspect will be easily disproved in the event of an injury or environmental contamination at the mine site. The Navajo Nation had to buy the mine at $85 million but will not make any profits from the coal that is mined there until after this debt is paid off. We basically took a declining industry in the Navajo Nation and also made it into an unprofitable one in our insistence to OWN the mine. Had we let BHP continue to run the mine we could have maintained the normal or slightly lower (given the subsequent shut down of generating units at Four Corners and San Juan Generating Stations after the mine deal was announced) revenues from the mine until 2016 when BHP’s lease for the mine expires. We could have taken that money from coal revenue and heavily invested it in an alternative industry, maybe not even energy related, in lieu of the jobs and revenues at the mine. But our political leadership, who Chris Deschene supported, opted for the easier but more dangerous route of buying the mine and thinking about the consequences later. This is not clear headed thinking. It’s political opportunism. Deschene’s support for the mine bought him powerful friends at the expense of the Navajo Nations future. He probably received campaign contributions from NTEC or members of the organization. He put his personal political gains above the risks to all of us with the purchase of this mine. And he did all of this with a bun espousing to be “traditional.” (A rule of thumb I’m starting to develop is that bun or braids on a politician correlates strongly with political opportunists.) 3. Little Colorado Settlement of 2012 Another shortsighted example of Chris Deschene’s advocacy was when he wrote a letter to the Navajo Times restating many of the central talking points of the proposed Little Colorado River settlement in 2012. The gist of the justification for the settlement was that it was our best opportunity to get a good agreement between the Navajo Nation and the State of Arizona. We would agree to what is left of the Little Colorado River after it runs down from upland Mormon communities where two large uncontested dams exist in exchange for not contesting these existing water usages. There were two bonuses attached to the settlement: 1) The Navajo Nation also claimed without contention the two large N and C aquifers in the western end of the reservation, and 2) two water projects that tapped into these aquifers would be constructed. Advocates for the settlement claimed that this would lead to “wet water” instead of paper water. The irony is that without a large water project associated with the proposal, the water would be almost entirely paper. But there is something fundamentally structurally flawed with the proposal and in order to understand it you have to look back to a similar agreement that the Navajo Nation Council did endorse in 2010 that tapped the Colorado River directly. This settlement offer, virtually the same as the 2012 one, had one unique feature; the Navajo Nation would have a pipe in the heavily contested Upper Colorado apportionment of the Colorado River. Then Arizona Senator Kyl rejected it, claiming it would be too expensive for Congress to support. At $800 million for an estimated 80,000 residents (although Pollack puts the figure closer to $515 million ), Stanley Pollack is reported saying at the time that he “didn’t even try to get it funded.” For some reason Pollack likes to place emphasis on grassroots organizations for the failure of a comprehensive settlement to the claims of the Little Colorado River and Upper Colorado River waters, but Kyl has consistently proven to be the main obstacle to Navajo water settlements. Kyl single handedly disrupted the San Juan River Settlement to pull out 6,411 acre feet of water a year that should’ve gone to Navajo communities in St Michaels, Fort Defiance, and Window Rock at the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project saying that Navajo communities would not get that water until the Navajo Nation agreed to a settlement of the Little Colorado and Upper Colorado River waters. He also rejected the 2010 Northeastern Water Settlement that would have given the Navajo Nation 31,000 acre-feet of water a year from Arizona’s 50,000 acre-feet Upper Colorado apportionments from the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Both items Kyl rejected would have given the Navajo Nation water from Arizona’s Upper Colorado apportionment, something that Navajo Nation has consistently been denied for the past 50 years despite the fact that the entire physical boundary north of Lee’s Ferry (where the upper and lower Colorado River is divided) is bordered by the Navajo Nation. Additionally, the only large water user in the area is the Navajo Generating Station, which uses approximately as much water as the Navajo Nation would have received in the 2010 settlement agreement. Navajo Nation hydrologist Jack Utter contends that that water is a give away to NGS and, one might speculate, if the Navajo Nation made claims to 31,000 acre-feet it could charge NGS for water usage. I don’t know how this legal question would have held up given that the Navajo Nation already agreed to waive its claims to the water for a contract with NGS. Regardless, APS owns 14% of the NGS and the company that owns it, Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, was one of Kyl’s largest campaign contributors since 2005. There are probably more connections between Kyl and energy as he worked as a water rights attorney in Arizona before joining Congress in the late 1980s. The point is that he has blocked every attempt for the Navajo Nation to get water from Arizona’s apportionment of the Upper Colorado River. That water became extremely contentious in 1968 after the passage of the Central Arizona Project and members of Upper Colorado Basin states expressed concern that CAP would draw upon their apportionment. Dechene failed to address any of these issues. He also supported a provision in the settlement agreement that would have made it virtually impossible for the Navajo Nation to put land into trust again--ever. Anyone who supported this provision of the settlement is as close to a traitor to the Navajo Nation as you can get. Deschene didn’t say a word on this. Likely Deschene didn’t even know this provision existed. I doubt he examined the settlement at all. His letter was likely ghost written by Stanley Pollack, which explains why Pollack become so vocal when people criticized Deschene for it. Not only is Deschene an opportunist, but likely a plagiarist too. I do agree with some of Pollack’s points (attributed to Deschene) that we need to have an idea of what we want in terms of water rights (either in the form of settlement or litigation). But that doesn’t mean we should have supported this settlement simply because Kyl was promoting it. There were some carrots, but we were giving up too much to make the carrots worth it. Additionally, the main argument for settlement was not that the Navajo Nation had a weak legal case, but that the political landscape was unfavorable. Even though this was Pollack and Deschene’s main point, it was the least thought through (typical of the arrogance of lawyers in the Navajo Nation). Their assessment of the political landscape was based on little more than surmise. In the case of Deschene, he proved to be hopelessly wrong in the past when he advocated for Desert Rock and didn’t anticipate how a changed presidency (Bush to Obama) could silence the project immediately and only after the Navajo Nation invested millions upon millions of dollars into it. Shirley’s former press release office and as far as I can tell Deschene supporter George Hardeen said that Obama is to blame for the failure of Desert Rock, as if that’s an adequate excuse. If the planners and promoters of Desert Rock didn’t anticipate how a shift in the political environment might suddenly and abruptly nullify all of the Navajo Nation’s investments in a project, then why should we believe their judgment on anything as consequential as water rights? Like promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they have been tragically wrong again and again and we continue to listen to them. 4. Chris Deschene, Old Wine New Bottles Chris Deschene’s only opponent is Joe Shirley Jr., who was instrumental in most of what is described above. This comment shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of Shirley, but to point out that Deschene is not an alternative to these policies and projects but a doubling down on them. He is the next generation of corporatist governance and one with stronger connections to political interests in Maricopa and Coconino counties. Like I said in the past, Chris Deschene is old wine in a new bottle. Posted 5 hours ago by Andrew Curley
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:53:15 +0000
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