SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY

LENGTH: 1096 words

COMMITTEE: HOUSE TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE

SUBCOMMITTEE: HIGHWAYS AND TRANSIT

HEADLINE: FEDERAL LANDS HIGHWAY PROGRAM

TESTIMONY-BY: MR.TIM TUBBY, MISSISSIPPI BAND OF CHOCTAW INDIANS

BODY:
Statement of Mr.Tim Tubby Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians

Subcommittee on Highways and Transit Committee on House Transportation and Infrastructure

U.S. House of Representatives

October 9, 2002

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, my name is Tim Tubby, and I am a development planner for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Accompanying me today is Mark A. Whitney, our Tribal Roads Engineer. Chief Martin could not be here today, but he wanted me to extend his sincere appreciation to the Subcommittee for this opportunity to share our views on federal road programs. Chief Martin is keenly aware of how important roads and other transportation infrastructure are to successful economic development for tribes. By way of background, Mr. Chairman, our Tribe consists of 8,300 members. Our reservation land exceeds 25,500 acres. Under the leadership of Chief Martin, we have sought and achieved financial independence by creating a strong reservation-based economy. We own many businesses in conjunction with major corporations--such as Ford Motor Company, Chrysler Corporation, Xerox, American Greetings, McDonalds. In addition to being one of the largest employers in Mississippi, our Tribe is responsible for $260 million in annual gross domestic product for the state.. The impact of this growth for members of the Tribe has been overwhelmingly positive. In the past 20 years, the Tribe's unemployment rate has fallen from 75 percent to just 2 percent.

Our tribal leadership approaches decisions from a business perspective. We seek opportunities and then allow our people to flourish.

Today, we would like to share our experience with federal roads programs and suggest some possible improvements to allow tribes like ours to better serve its needs. Our construction company builds our roads--both BIA and non-BIA roads. As a result, we have the capacity to build projects efficiently and control our future.

We would like to first draw your attention to the comments that we submitted on the proposed Indian Reservation Road (IRR) Program just last week. In our view, the IRR program delivers roads to reservations with the same amount of speed and red tape as the Department of the Interior is delivering the Indian Reservation Roads rulemaking. TEA-21 stated the rule was due by October 1, 1999, but we are three years past the deadline now and we still do not have a final rule. You are just about to rewrite that law and the rulemaking ink is not even printed.

As a result, our comments on the rule may be useful to the Subcommittee and I have appended them for the record. If you have the time to actually review the rule and the comments, you will get an appreciation of how difficult it is for the Tribes to work with this program.

In a nutshell, based on our experience, we believe the IRR Program is inefficient, time-consuming, subject to widely varying interpretations, overly bureaucratic, and does not adequately allow us to use engineering judgment. We believe that there are well-intentioned people running the program, but it just does not deliver road money in a way that we can best use it to serve our community's needs.

When this Committee reauthorizes the program, we think that you should consider a fresh approach that reflects the growing sophistication of Tribes like ours.

For example, we think that the Federal government could best meet it obligation to Tribes if we were trusted us a bit more. We need the latitude, flexibility, and direct funding to meet the road and transportation priorities that we have right now.

The Congress could allow us to use the financial tools--such as bonding--to help us to get more road projects underway right now. If we had a predictable, stable flow of funds through which we could pledge for payment of road bonds, we could more quickly meet the transportation needs of for our Tribe and the public that uses our roads.

In the past two years, under BIA we completed only one project--a $1.2 million overlay of an existing road. If we knew we would have $5 or $10 million per year for the next 6 years in IRR funds, we could get to work on $25 to $50 million or more worth of Tribal roads today.

We have the capability to handle such an undertaking. We now finance millions of dollars using bonds and financial instruments for our business growth annually. We have years of experience in the road construction.

As I mentioned, using BIA resources, we were only able to build one road in the past 2 years. Using our resources and putting money where roads are needed, we have designed and paved 20 BIA and non-BIA roads in just one year, 2002.

In addition, without the Federal program we have a proven commitment to several facets of road transportation. We added a third lane to an existing road. We paved (with the county government) numerous unpaved roads used by the general public. We performed a traffic safety study of signage on BIA and Tribal roads. We analyzed traffic signal systems for BIA, Tribal, and public roads. We inventoried our own roads. We worked within the Tribal government to raise the priority for road construction.

One of our largest problems is that the BIA system does not allow us to quickly modify our road construction priorities. The BIA Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) for our Tribe is 12 years old. The BIA process to change the TIP is slow and cumbersome. Reviews occur in BIA and FHWA--yet we are the ones that know where our growth is and where we need roads.

The evolving transportation needs for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians cannot be reflected in the current TIP process because of untimely agency reviews and the very limited number of projects that can be added to the TIP. Limiting project additions to the funding received in prior years limits what we can get into the pipeline for design, engineering, and construction. As you consider a new approach to the IRR program, reform it so that it that empowers Tribes, instead of holding us hostage to burdensome federal red tape.

We need some control, and control means we need to get road dollars as directly as possible, we need to be able to leverage them, and we need to apply them where we know they will do the best. What we need from the IRR Program is the same thing businesses need--a flow of revenue that is growing and stable. If you give us that and allow us to pledge that revenue for road bonds, then we can make a better, more efficient, and safer transportation system for our reservation.

LOAD-DATE: October 15, 2002