Delegates debate, listen to explanations of NGS lease

WINDOW ROCK

It was a week’s worth of debate and explanation when it came to the more than 500-page Navajo Generating Station replacement lease between the Navajo Nation and the NGS owners.

The bill to approve the lease, which needed the OK of the Health, Education and Human Services Committee, Resource and Development, Budget and Finance, Naabik’íyáti’ and then the Navajo Nation Council, was voted on after a few hours of deliberation by each committee, in hopes of a decision by the July 1st deadline.

As of Wednesday, two committees passed the bill but Budget and Finance voted it down. The bill is scheduled on the Naabik’íyáti’ agenda today.

“This is a huge decision,” said Speaker LoRenzo Bates, sponsor of the bill. “Not only does this impact Navajo, but Hopi, northern Arizona and the state.”

The Navajo Generating Station located in Lechee, Arizona, provides electricity to customers in Arizona and Nevada by burning low sulfur bituminous coal from the Peabody Western Coal Company’s Kayenta Mine.

NGS operated under a lease since 1969 and by those terms they are on the verge of closing in 2019. Which means they have to shut the mine down in 2017 in order to be out by 2019.

In 2013 an amendment was approved to renew or extend 323 rights-of-way and easements through December 2044, which NGS owners never executed. So Navajo Nation is still on the 1969 lease.

“Today we do not have a signed lease from 2013, so we are currently operating on the 1969 resolution,” said Bates. “The owners have decided in order to vacate the premises entirely, they need to start shutting down in 2017.”

In Bates’ presentation he said what was in jeopardy of being lost should the Council not vote on the lease is over $30 million per year in revenue from NGS, which supports approximately one-third of the government’s budget.

The nation could lose over 400 jobs at NGS and hundreds more at Kayenta Mine, which is the sole provider of coal for NGS.

The state of Arizona could lose over half a billion dollars of tax revenue and many other secondary markets that benefit from the power plant’s operations and over 3,000 jobs, if the power plant should close this year.

Also important to the Navajo Nation, according to Bates, are the assets it can acquire such as the railroad track and related facilities valued at $120 million, the lake pump facility, fences and equipment for the air monitoring station and $18 million to be paid to the Navajo Nation in a three-year installment.

If the Council does vote on the lease, Bates said any amendments that change the lease drastically would cause the owners, who did not appear at any of the committee meetings, not to go any further.

Bates said he informed the owners there would most definitely be amendments.

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