The importance of water rights to the Navajo Nation

In order to fully comprehend the importance of water rights, we first need to look at the grim future of Navajo coal resources, and a current economic policy designed to offset the imminent multimillion-dollar deficit to the Navajo Nation’s annual operating budget.

The Future of Navajo Coal Resources

Navajo coal resources will not last forever. Neither will the revenue it produces nor the jobs it created and maintained for decades. President Kelsey Begaye expressed this national concern in his 1999 State of the Navajo Nation address to the Navajo Council and people. “It is my regrettable duty to inform you [the Navajo People] that the coal revenues on the Navajo lease portion of the McKinley Mine will be depleted in approximately (6) years… Sacrifices are ahead.”

We have four years to go until the Navajo government loses an estimated $8 to $18 million in revenues. Likewise, in 2005, approximately 400 proud, hard working Navajo miners will be unemployed. This projected loss, year after year, will be several times as devastating than the anticipated $20 million dollar deficit President Begaye faced for Fiscal Year 2000. With the closing of just one mine, the terror of layoffs will electrify the air in Window Rock, important tribal programs may cease to exist, and The People will bear the burden. Inevitably, what will happen to the coal resources at the McKinley mine will also happen to the coal resources at the Peabody Mine in Black Mesa.

Taxing the Navajo Nation

A current economic policy designed to counter the future loss of mining revenues is to tax the Navajo people. Taxes,” to use an often-quoted expression, “are the blood of government.” Taxes are necessary for a government to operate. They produce revenues that are appropriated to tribal programs, and further more, they develop a government’s scope of authority, i.e. sovereignty.

Despite the popular sentiment that taxes are bad, much needed government programs operate on money individual citizens pay through taxes. But can the economy afford, support, and maintain a comprehensive tax system? An economy plagued with high unemployment, economic under-development, and supplemented by federal funding and welfare programs will be overly burdened.

In fact, the general health of Navajo elders and people living in poverty would stand a good chance of deteriorating. The price of food products in all convenience and grocery stores on the Navajo Nation bears this out. Healthy foods such as vegetables, lean meats, fruits, and wheat and grain breads—if they’re available—are more expensive than unhealthy foods high in sodium, cholesterol, and starch; foods like potatoes, all canned foods, cheap noodle soup, and white bread. Most of these food items are even more expensive than in large grocery stores in Flagstaff and Page, and Gallup and Farmington.

Many Navajo people rely on the local convenience store for their groceries. The luxury of driving up to 80 miles for inexpensive groceries simply does not exist. A sales tax on the reservation will make groceries even more expensive. An elderly person or a family surviving on $8,300 dollars will naturally buy foods that are more affordable—foods that are a major dietary cause for diabetes, heart disease, and possibly even cancer. If there must be a sales tax, it should specifically target commercial tobacco products and unhealthy food products, thus improving the health of Navajo people while giving them a break.

Before a comprehensive tax policy can be safely instituted, the total economic system must be able to afford, support, and maintain it without economically oppressing people whose income is supplemented by social security, welfare programs, and pawning valuable items like jewelry, ceremonial buckskins, vehicles, and livestock trailers.

Navajo Water Rights

With the weighty concern surrounding future coal resources, unemployment, and taxes, water has come to reaffirm its honored distinction as the source of life, in more ways than one.

Water is critically important to the future well-being of the Navajo Nation. One of the creative alternatives to taxation is the pursuit of water rights to the Colorado River. An awesome amount of revenue from the sale/leasing of water or the large scale development of Navajo agribusiness dwarfs the amount of revenues generated by taxation. In one realm, the selling/leasing of water rights produces a livelihood for the Navajo Nation government, in the other, the development of agribusiness produces a livelihood for Navajo people.

How much, in revenues, could the Navajo Nation possibly generate in the selling/leasing of water? According to an Internet company that specializes in the stockbrokering and trading of water rights and water, the going market for 28,000 acre feet of water is, conservatively, $30 million dollars. That appears to be an amazing amount of water and an equally amazing amount of money, but it is no where near the amount the Navajo Nation may be entitled to if it only asserts its water rights claim to a portion of the Colorado River.

But who will buy or lease Navajo water? All the cities in Southern Arizona: Phoenix, Tucson, Scottsdale, Tempe, and Fountain Hills, and maybe even southern California: Los Angeles and San Diego and all places in between. In order to break down the abstraction of “cities,” and grasp the enormity of it all, here’s some numbers: the Arizona Republic recently cited the need for water, as well as the importance of water, in an article on water shortages in Southern Arizona. Phoenix is developing, via urban sprawl, at the rate of one acre per hour. That’s 168 acres in the last week. In the last five years, 100,000 to 125,000 homes were built in Phoenix alone—20,000 to 25,000 homes per year.

Each home, it is estimated uses 220 to 225 gallons of water per day, or 4.4 to 5.6 million gallons every 24 hours! And that’s not including car washes, swimming pools, or watering the hundreds of thousands of acres of grassy lawns.

The Economic Windfall of Water

Based on these numbers and recalling the $30 million dollar price tag on 28,000 acre feet of water, as well as the more than 12 million acre feet of water the Navajo Nation will require, the Navajo Nation possibly stands to make hundreds of times more than the combined revenues of coal and taxes in the last decade. Furthermore, the Navajo Nation also stands to inherit a large scale agribusiness that may provide a lively hood for hundreds of Navajo families.

But first, the Navajo Nation must act. Time is of the essence.

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