by Billy House
Republic Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON – Language inserted in an Interior Department spending bill may force lawmakers to choose between urgently needed funds to battle wildfires and delaying a federal court-ordered accounting of billions of trust fund dollars that American Indians say have been misplaced.
Lawmakers are expected to vote on the bill in the coming days.
“This is a cynical and shocking development to Native people,” said Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff in a 7-year-old lawsuit that has forced the Interior Department to fully account for trust funds it holds for them.
Cobell and other plaintiffs in a class-action suit said the Interior Department has mismanaged the royalties in those accounts for up to 500,000 Indians, potentially amounting to billions of dollars.
The accounts date from 1887 for such things as the right to drill for oil and gas on Indian-owned lands, or for the use of timber or for grazing rights. In September, a judge ordered the department to account for misplaced trust-fund money.
But opponents of such an accounting have pointed in part to studies showing it would cost taxpayers an estimated $9 billion to $12 billion to retrace and verify all the transactions for every account.
It is against this backdrop and the backdrop of catastrophic wildfires this year in California and Arizona that a Senate-House conference committee has quietly inserted the language into the Interior Department bill delaying the court-ordered accounting by a year, to Dec. 31, 2004.
Because the same bill contains $3 billion for wildland firefighting and forest treatment, lawmakers who might oppose delaying the trust-fund accounting would be placing wildfire funding in jeopardy if they voted against the bill.
Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., who is both supportive of the tribal trust claims and “grateful” for the increased wildfire funding, said he is dismayed by the addition of the accounting-delay language, said his spokesman, Larry VanHoose.
House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., in a letter Monday to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., said that he is strongly opposed to the language or any other measure to “delay the resolution of the Indian trust-fund accounting problem and the court case for years.”
Pombo says that the language, inserted without his knowledge, “removes any incentive for the Department of Interior to go forward with an accounting or settlement while Native Americans will wait years more for their monies.”
“This is beyond sneaky,” said Keith Harper, a lawyer for the Native American Rights Fund. “This happened in the dead of night.”
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