Court appoints monitor to oversee Indian trust reform
The Associated Press
By: Robert Gehrke
Associated Press Writer
April 16, 2001
WASHINGTON (AP) A federal judge appointed a monitor Monday to supervise the overhaul of a federal land program that Indian tribes say robbed them of up to $10 billion.
Attorneys representing 300,000 Indian plaintiffs who are suing the Interior Department had complained that the government’s efforts to restructure the land trust program, as ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, have been ineffective.
”Basically, trust reform has been a myth,” lawyer Dennis Gingold said. ”They’ve spent $50 million and not accomplished a thing.”
Lamberth appointed Joseph Kieffer III to follow the overhaul program and file progress reports with the court. The department must give Kieffer access to employees and information needed for his inquiry.
Both sides accepted Kieffer’s appointment after three meetings with Lamberth over the last several weeks.
”We view this as the first sign of good faith extended by the Department of Interior in five years of litigation,” said Gingold, who called it ”the most comprehensive judicial oversight of the executive branch that has ever occurred.”
Justice Department lawyer Phillip Brooks said ”the government is embracing the idea” of trust reform and hopes to move the case forward quickly.
”We welcome the appointment of an independent monitor, and we view it as constructive to accomplishing our goals, which are a renewed effort to advance trust fund reform,” Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna said.
The Indians sued in 1996 over a century’s worth of problems with the system that handles about $500 million a year in proceeds from oil wells and other uses of Indian land. The Indians say they are due at least $10 billion.
The trust accounts came from an 1887 federal law that divided some reservation land into smaller plots for individual Indians. The government holds the land in trust for the Indians, meaning it cannot be taxed or sold and the government must approve leases.
Many of the tracts are leased for uses such as grazing, logging, mining or oil drilling. Proceeds are supposed to have been deposited in government accounts, then paid to the Indian landholders.
Since the beginning, however, the accounts have been mismanaged in almost every way imaginable, the government admits. Records were never kept for many accounts, while documentation for others was lost or destroyed. Some of the money was stolen or used for other federal programs. Some lease proceeds were never collected. Thousands of accounts have money in them but no names attached.
Last year Lamberth held in contempt then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and fined them more than $600,000 for failing to turn over documents related to the case. He threatened to do the same to Bush administration officials if they should fail to comply.
”I don’t want it to come to that again, but I am prepared to do what is necessary to get trust reform accomplished,” Lamberth said.
Earlier, Lamberth appointed Alan Balaran to investigate the fund mismanagement. Balaran will help familiarize Kieffer with the issues of the case.
Kieffer has a background in military intelligence. He also was director of litigation for the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust, created in 1986 to settle claims by people exposed to asbestos in products made by Johns Manville. That trust’s value is estimated at $3 billion.
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