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By Georgie Wood
(ggannwood@yahoo.com)
Back in 1982, 16 people with certain interests in the Elin Chiquito Allotment along Aravaipa Creek had given permission to my husband and me, and our neighbors, the Edward Newtons, to fence in a portion of the Allotment near the Aravaipa road in order to deter people from encroaching upon and degrading the part of the Allotment that adjoined the small creekside field my husband and I owned. It appeared on the agreement that each Mable Bendle and Janie Bullis Ferriera had the highest undivided 12/60 interest in the Allotment. I had wondered if any of these heirs of the Elin Chiquito Allotment were included with those heirs who agreed to the building in 2000 of the fish barriers on Aravaipa Creek by the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) – of course, with the agreement of the San Carlos Agency, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) – and I also wondered what their settlement amount would be.
According to BOR’s response to a long and interesting September 7, 1998 letter during the public comment process that had been printed in BOR’s 1998 Final Environmental Assessment (EA), the negotiation for this acquisition was between BOR and BIA as Trustee for certain members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe; an appraisal has been prepared by BOR and is under review by BIA; the appraisal is confidential until the offer is accepted; under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Exemption 5, Privileged Information, BOR cannot reveal to the public the amount of compensation disclosed by the appraisal, which, if approved, will be the amount offered to tribal members for the acquisition; and once an agreement is reached and the appropriate documents are signed, public disclosure of the settlement amount is permissible.
Those who work in Government jobs are not immune from making mistakes! After I twice requested in 2007 the terms of the agreement between BOR and the Allotment heirs, Carol Lynn Erwin, BOR’s Phoenix-area Manager, replied that at the time of the public comment process associated with the 1998 EA for the construction of the fish barriers, BOR had been unaware of forthcoming legal restrictions on release of information regarding Indians and what they own, and that BOR erroneously responded through the EA that public disclosure of the agreement would be permissible once the ongoing negotiations were completed. This Department of the Interior-wide judicial restriction resulted from an ongoing lawsuit entitled “Cobell v. Secretary of the Interior.” After searching that, I read that lawsuit was the largest government class-action settlement in our nation’s history.
An October of 2008 letter to me from BOR, Washington,DC stated that recent court decisions have given more discretion to release the lease agreement, and the lease agreement was enclosed for my information, but a copy of the agreement was NOT enclosed as the letter stated, and the date of the Aravaipa Creek flood of August 1, 2006 had the year as 2007! A follow-up letter from BOR did admit to the mistakes (after I wrote them!), and among the information blacked out and left out on the enclose copy of the agreement were page numbers six (6) through nine (9) which contained a list of the landowners’ names, enrollment numbers, and the amount of compensation paid to the landowners. Stated was “The information on these pages is considered proprietary by Department of Interior standards and has been removed from this document.”
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