Presto! Council’s budget amendments are back
WINDOW ROCK
Some $7.8 million in funds vetoed by President Begaye in the present fiscal year’s Navajo Nation budget could be restored tomorrow.
The Budget and Finance committee approved legislation that will amend the Navajo Nation Fiscal Year 2017 budget. It will be heading to the Naabik’iyátí’ Committee Thursday. If passed, it will then be deliberated during the council’s special session that same afternoon.
The budget debate has been an issue that refuses to die. The Navajo Nation Council challenged the legitimacy of Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye’s signature on 17 line-item vetoes in September because it was unsure where exactly, whether off or on the Navajo Nation, he signed the budget. Ethel Branch, Navajo Nation Attorney General, sided with Begaye, resulting in his vetoes standing.
The council had juggled funding in the budget it passed in September, taking $9.3 million from the Air Transport fund, the Undesignated Unreserved Fund, the personnel lapse fund, the Controller’s Office and the retirement benefits fund and reallocating it to Amber Alert development, scholarships, the Navajo Area Agency on Agency and other things. Begaye had vetoed this reallocated funding, saying the budget had been strategically planned by all three branches and reallocating the funds was wrong and, in some cases, possibly illegal.
According to the new legislation, the line-item vetoes had created unallocated funds of $8.3 million, although it’s not clear why these monies wouldn’t revert to the funds they came from. Controller Jim Parris did not return a phone call to explain why the dollars are now considered “unallocated.”
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Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow