Shirley offers up $2.9 billion wish list

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Karen Francis
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. submitted a request for $2.9 billion in funding for the Navajo Nation’s priority needs to the Obama Biden transition team for the President-elect’s proposed $775 billion stimulus project, the president’s office said.

The Council’s Intergovernmental Relations Committee approved the “Navajo Nation Federal Agenda for the Obama-Biden Transition Team and 111th Congress” on Jan. 5 authorizing the president and speaker to advocate for the priority needs to the new administration and Congress.

The 50-page document is the result of a three-day workshop among Navajo Nation division directors held in Washington last month and input from the Intergovernmental Relations Committee. The packet was delivered to the transition team by the Navajo Nation Washington Office, the president’s office said.

The document lists the Navajo Nation’s needs priorities in transportation and roads, education and school construction, community development, water management, public safety, health care programs and new facilities, judicial services, information technology, economic development and the rehabilitation needs of people impacted by the Navajo-Hopi Relocation Act.

It also lists legislative priorities for the 111th Congress and 27 policy recommendations for the incoming administration.

In a Jan. 5 letter to the transition team, Shirley described the Navajo Nation as equal in size to the combined area of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont but with significant economic and social needs.

“Within that vast space are too few employers for our people, thousands of miles of rough dirt roads that are traveled daily, and inadequate means of communication,” he said. “More than half of our families heat their homes with wood they cut themselves, drink water hauled in barrels from windmills, and light rooms with kerosene and gas lanterns.”

Shirley said that the Nation lies at the geographic center of the fastest-growing region of the United States but historically has not taken part in the prosperity the Southwest has enjoyed.

Shirley said when the country went through previous economic boom and bust cycles, with the federal government providing help, Navajos historically have been forgotten and left out. But no area or people are more deserving of help than Navajos, he said.

Without the help a federal economic stimulus program could provide Navajos will continue to have to leave their homeland to find the work the want and need, Shirley said.