Halona: Short-staffing to blame for home-site lease delays
Navajo Times | File
Mike Halona addresses a group of citizens in Chinle about the new homesite lease regulations in 2017.
LOS ANGELES
The head of the Navajo Nation’s Land Department, which again has come under criticism for failure to process home-site leases in a timely manner, said his office is doing its best despite budget cuts that reduced its employees from 150 to just 27.
Mike Halona, director of the department, said every year he has submitted a supplemental request for additional staff to catch up with the backlog but every year it has been denied.
And every year the tribe has reduced the department’s budget, making it even harder to keep up with the demand. The latest criticism comes from the auditor general who issued a report in October detailing a study it had done of the department’s home-site leasing process.
The auditors looked at 100 home-site leases that had been submitted and said that 10 months was a reasonable time for the department to complete the process. Only 56 of the applications were approved within 10 months. This is not a new complaint.
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