NTEC reports record dividend but declines to disclose executive pay
WINDOW ROCK
Executives of the Navajo Transitional Energy Company came before the Naabik’íyáti’ Committee June 11 to announce a record $5.5 million dividend and report roughly $121 million in total economic impact to the Navajo Nation in 2025.
By the end of the hearing, the executives had declined to tell the committee what the company’s top officers are paid and had absorbed pointed questions about why, 13 years after its creation, the wholly Navajo-owned enterprise still has no Navajo chief executive and no senior officers living on the reservation.
NTEC is owned entirely by the Navajo Nation but operates under an independent board and an operating agreement that, its leaders said, governs nearly every major decision, including how much it pays the Nation.
NTEC board chairman Timothy McLaughlin, CEO Vern Lund and general counsel Bernard Masters presented the report.
Lund and McLaughlin walked delegates through a financial picture anchored by coal. NTEC, they said, is now the third-largest coal producer in the United States, with operations at the Navajo Mine plus mines in Wyoming and Montana, a 7% stake in the Four Corners Power Plant and an undeveloped lithium claim in Arizona.
To read the full article, please see the June 18, 2026, edition of the Navajo Times.
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