Tulalip News

Marysville enjoys music, movies in the park

Kirk Boxleitner, Marysville Globe

MARYSVILLE — The city of Marysville’s summer concert series and “Popcorn in the Park” are in full swing at Jennings Park, where hundreds are flocking each week for free music and free movies, courtesy of the Marysville Parks and Recreation Department and a number of supportive community groups.

Thursday, July 18, saw the Wild Snohomians perform for a hillside full of families, thanks to the Cottages at Marysville serving as exclusive sponsors of the Thursday evening summer concert series. On Saturday, July 20, Waste Management treated an entire playing field of families to the animated film “Shark Tale,” as exclusive sponsors of the Saturday night “Popcorn in the Park” for which the Marysville Kiwanis Club provides free popcorn. The Hillside Church of Marysville sells snacks and refreshments to attendees of both the Thursday concerts and the Saturday movie screenings to support their own church programs.

“A lot of folks leave town on Fridays, so we shifted the concerts to Thursdays,” Marysville Parks and Recreation Director Jim Ballew said. “That’s worked out really well so far.”

Indeed, while Brandon Wilson of the Hillside Church estimated that they usually serve at least 30 customers during each concert and movie screening, Marysville Kiwanis Club President Walter McKinney noted that this year’s first “Popcorn in the Park” on July 13 ran out of popcorn to hand out at 9:15 p.m., barely after the movie had started.

“We must have handed out 500 bags of popcorn,” said McKinney, who credited Sound Harley-Davidson of Smokey Point with purchasing the popcorn for the Kiwanis, whose Key Club members from Marysville Getchell High School have volunteered as popcorn poppers and servers for the movie screenings. “That’s about 30 pounds of popcorn kernels.”

Ask any family why they attend these concerts and movie screenings, and many will likely echo Andrew and Jamie Smith, who appreciated being able to take their 2-year-old son Kingston out for an evening of music on July 18 that normally would have been past his bedtime.

“We can usually hear the concerts from our house,” laughed Jamie Smith, whose home is just up the hill from Jennings Park. “I love how low-key of a get-together it is. It’s just real family-friendly fun.”

“We’re regulars for both the concerts and the movies,” said A.J. Suttie, whose blanket on the Jennings Park hillside overlooking the Wild Snohomians on July 18 was occupied by her own children and their friends. “When the weather is good like this, it’s just good to get outside and enjoy the summer on a weeknight. The kids can have some fun without just hanging around the house.”

Kyle Crosby, Jesus Ortiz and Jakob Palermo are 20-somethings rather than parents or kids, but the trio agreed that they still appreciate the summer concert series as a means of socializing and connecting with the community, while July 18 marked John and Judy Swendsen’s first Jennings Park concert, since Judy is originally from California and John had moved away from his native Marysville for a few years.

“It’s great the way the trees are able to shade the band,” John Swendsen said, as he aimed his camera-phone at his fellow attendees, “and it’s almost more fun to watch the kids dancing than it is the folks in the band playing,” he laughed. “It’s a great way to wind down the tail end of the week.”

“It’s a great neighborhood event,” Judy Swendsen said. “Especially for Thursday, which isn’t quite the weekend yet, it gives you something nice to do after dinner.”

Melissa Vaughn and Jessica Hawkins had attended “Popcorn in the Park” in previous summers, and July 20 brought them and their own respective broods out in force for “Shark Tale.”

“This is so much fun to do together, as a family,” Hawkins said. “We live close enough that we can just walk here, so we’ll get a group of friends and just pile in.”

“I love the atmosphere,” Vaughn said. “There’s lots of local people here.”

“It’s great to see so many families all in one place,” said Penny Ploeger, also of the Marysville Kiwanis Club. “The kids can run around because it’s a safe place, and parents with multiple kids don’t have to spend $60 just to see a single movie.”

For more information on the city of Marysville Parks and Recreation Department’s summer concert series and “Popcorn in the Park,” log onto www.marysvillewa.gov/calendar.aspx?CID=21.

Cherokee Fire Dancers Leap Into Northern California Blazes

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

The Cherokee Nation has sent its elite squad of firefighters to Oregon to help fight wildfires in northern California.

The dozen-member team, the Cherokee Fire Dancers, deployed to the Northwestern state on Tuesday July 23 to “work 16-hour days, hiking up to seven miles per day to cut down timber to create fire breaks to help battle the flames,” the tribe said in a statement.

“It’s a thrill watching a fire as it’s contained and know you’ve helped,” said Danny Maritt, of Tahlequah, who has been a Fire Dancer for 23 years, in the tribe’s statement. “We’re glad we’re out there making a difference.”

Fire Dancers are on call from the U.S. Forestry Department, the tribe said. Their last mission was assisting in cleanup efforts from Superstorm Sandy in New Jersey.

The Fire Dancers have traveled back and forth across the United States since 1988 to help suppress wildfires, earning “an outstanding reputation and the respect of wildland management agencies throughout the United States,” the tribe’s website says.

Information on specific fires that the Cherokee team will help with was not available, but there were several fires burning in northern California earlier in the week. Many have been contained, but others, such as the Aspen fire, were still being suppressed. That was at 2,000 acres in hard-to-access territory in the High Sierra Ranger District of the Sierra National Forest, where it was discovered burning on July 23, according to Inciweb. As of late morning on July 25, the fire had burned about 2,000 acres and remained active.

Flailing Grade: Indian Education Goes From Bold Plans to ‘Just Hang On’

Rob Capriccioso, Indian Country Today Media Network

At the beginning of the Obama administration, there was major hope from Indian education advocates that Native-friendly policies could be enacted that would shift the federal focus from rigid criteria-based testing to making sure Indian students were actually succeeding in culturally relevant ways. After five years, hopes have waned, and protecting the status quo has become the next best option.

In 2009, the first year of President Barack Obama’s two terms, Natives had just experienced a tough 8-year stretch under the George W. Bush administration’s famous No Child Left Behind regime, where federal dollars were spent beefing up testing standards, and states—not tribes—were charged with leading the efforts.

Native culture, learning methods, and tribal language development were largely not on the minds of federal policy makers when the law was passed, nor on the minds of many state officials who had to implement the plan. Major opportunities to address the needs of Indian children were missed, lamented a plethora of tribal advocates. Test scores, some which showed Indian students scoring very low on the new standardized testing, soon proved that something was amiss.

With Bush gone and the No Child Left Behind Act, otherwise known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), coming up for reauthorization, Indian educators worked feverishly in the early Obama years to ensure their goals were met. Congressional briefings were held, White House connections were established, and Indian advocacy organizations got their messages out to the major education players.

There were early successes. Arne Duncan, the sole education secretary under the Obama administration to date, made contact, and he continues to do some major outreach to tribes to better understand their concerns. William Mendoza was appointed director of White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education in late-2011, and he has since admitted that federal bureaucracy has been too siloed in addressing Indian education needs—that there needs to be greater coordination between tribes and the Departments of the Interior and Education and Health and Human Services (a point Indian educators have long been making).

But the successes have been small, funding cuts have occurred under federal sequestration, and the ESEA has still not been reauthorized. Gridlock in Congress is one reason. Another, education experts from both political parties agree, is because Obama issued waivers to some of the parts of the Bush program that state educators disliked most, so a push for major reform ended up being sidelined.

“It’s been a recipe for protecting the status quo—that hasn’t been a great thing for Native students,” said Quinton Roman Nose, director of the Tribal Education Departments National Assembly.

“The reauthorization of the ESEA is way past due because the Obama administration has had problems building a consensus to get it done,” he assessed.

“Frustrated” is the best word to describe Native educators who have concurrently been forced to fend off further cuts proposed by Congress, Roman Nose said.

For instance, last week Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) received credit for amending H.R. 5, the Student Success Act, to prevent major reduction in funds and initiatives for American Indian and Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students. RELATED: Critical, Last-Minute Save For Indian Education

It was a success that leaders with the National Indian Education Association were forced to grit their teeth through. While celebrating the fact that more money wasn’t taken away, NIEA President Heather Shotton noted in a statement that the organization “does have strong concerns about H.R. 5 overall because it does not include our education priorities.” Those education priorities include strengthening tribal participation in education, preserving and revitalizing Native languages, providing tribes with access to the student records of tribal citizens, encouraging tribal-state partnerships, and equitably funding the Bureau of Indian Education. In other words, the same priorities that haven’t been acted on for years.

NIEA also wanted to make clear that it was not Young alone who protected Indian education. “[T]he story behind the passage of the amendment is one that really includes the work of Native organizations such as NIEA and tribes, who worked tirelessly for its passage,” said spokesman RiShawn Biddle, noting also that the amendment was offered by Young, as well as Reps. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), Colleen Hanabusa (D-HI), and Betty McCollum (D-MN).

No matter who received the credit, a cut was avoided, but how to move forward to get the real priorities addressed?

The message, for now, seems to be the same as it was at the beginning of Obama’s tenure: “We look forward to working with all congressional leaders, as well as with the Obama administration, on crafting a new version of the No Child Left Behind Act/Elementary and Secondary Education Act that advances equity for our American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children,” Shotton said in a statement. RELATED: No Child Left Behind Act: A Bust in Indian Country

Custer Had It Coming! Native American T-Shirts with Some Attitude

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

Everyone knows the famous Homeland Security t-shirt — it’s a picture of Geronimo and three other Natives with the tagline “Fighting terrorism since 1492” — but it’s just one of many sly shirts that we’ve spotted on in-the-know Natives. In a way, wearing your tribal heritage — and the legacy of injustice toward your people — on your sleeve keeps history alive in our increasingly ahistorical age. There is irreverence here, and even jokes — but the humor packs the punch of truth.

Below are links to the sites that furnished the images in this gallery.

The Original Founding Fathers (Tam’s Treasures)
Of Course You Can Trust The Government (The Yankee Dingo on Zazzle)
Insurgents (Demockratees)
My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys (coumrk on Zazzle)
Fuck Columbus and the Ship He Came in On (Demockratees)
Frybread Power (ZsTees on Zazzle)
Custer Had It Coming (BAN T-shirts)
Hero (Demockratees)
I Heart Rez Boys (Cheef Culture)
Retire Indian Masocts (Demockratees)
Illegal Immigration Started in 1492 (BAN T-shirts)
Chief Joseph: Disobey (Libertymaniacs on Zazzle)
Caucasians (Shelf Life Clothing)
I was Here First (Cheef Culture)
CUSTER PWN3D!!! (Demockratees)
American Indian Movement (Under the Red Sun on Skreened)
Where was the INS in 1492 (WhiteTiger LLC on Zazzle)
Holocaust Denier (Unifikation on Zazzle)

Indian Arts Organization Seeks to Help Artists with Parkinson’s Disease

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

Mary Lee Prescott is an elder member of the Oneida Indian Nation of Wisconsin who has pursued her passion for art since childhood, whether through painting, jewelry-making, or doll-making. Yet, in recent years, Mary has been struggling with the onset of Parkinson’s Disease, which has limited her ability to do art.

In 2013, Mary enrolled in non-contact boxing program offered by the Indianapolis, Indiana-based Rock Steady Boxing Inc., designed to addess the symptoms of Parkinson’s.

Mary is one of more than 2,600 Native Americans in the U.S. diagnosed with Parkinson’s, according to a federal study published in 2012 by a group of U.S. government health researchers. Another finding in the study was that little if any research has been conducted to identify the extent of Parkinson’s in Indian country, whether it is highlighting key risk factors for the disease unique to Native Americans, or the extent of complementary or alternative therapies available in the public health care system in Indian country, where resources in many cases have been relatively limited.

To address this situation for all American Indians, the Woodlands Tribal Artists Association—a Native American nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote a renaissance in eastern woodland Indian art and crafts—is rolling out an Artists Overcoming Parkinson’s Disease project. A goal of the project is to promote health research and education designed to help Native American artists and others effectively cope with Parkinson’s, so as to help them maintain a robust quality of life. The project seeks the participation of Federally recognized Indian Tribes, urban Indian communities, a university to assist with the research and educational components, and others with a stake in addressing Parkinson’s Disease in Indian Country and beyond. As soon as enough funds would be raised to support the project, it is anticipated the project would initially last 12 months.

For more information and to support the project, visit www.razoo.com/story/artistsovercomingparkinsons.

Groom retires from Tulalip Tribal Police

Kirk BoxleitnerTulalip Tribal Police Officer Larry Groom meets with the kids of the Tulalip Boys & Girls Club one last time, one day before stepping down from the force on July 26. — Kirk Boxleitner
Tulalip Tribal Police Officer Larry Groom meets with the kids of the Tulalip Boys & Girls Club one last time, one day before stepping down from the force on July 26.

Kirk Boxleitner, Marysville Globe

TULALIP — For two years after his ailing health forced him to retire from his full-time duties as the School Resource Officer for the Tulalip Tribal Police Department and the Marysville School District, Larry Groom was still able to put in part-time hours in his former position, but on Friday, July 26, he left the job for good due to his worsening condition.

“The very next week after I’d retired, Jay asked me if I’d come back on a part-time basis,” Groom said of Jay Goss, who was the chief of the Tulalip Tribal Police Department at the time. “After the first month, I went from five to four days a week. A while after that, I was working three days a week, then eventually two, and for the last several months, I’ve only been able to work two half-days each week. It’s just gotten harder and harder.”

Groom was diagnosed three years ago with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” but he found the strength to keep going from his desire to continue his nearly 40-year career in law enforcement, as well as his love of the many children he’s befriended in his role. And for a while after his retirement, the deterioration of his health leveled off, but his latest six-month medical checkup confirmed that his illness had grown more severe recently.

“When I was originally diagnosed, one lung was already gone and the other was only functioning at 36 percent,” Groom said. “I’ve had aches and pains throughout, but I’ve lost even more of my remaining lung function lately. I have a machine at night that works like the reverse of a sleep apnea machine, to help pull the air out of my lungs so that they can open up and inhale more air. When I’m not on the job, I walk with a cane or a walker, or I get around on a scooter, which helps with my back and legs, since they’re getting weaker.”

Still, Groom is able to look back fondly on a law enforcement career that’s included stints as the chief of police of two cities, as well as working with federal investigations, customs and the DEA. None of that, however, is what he’ll miss the most after he turns in his uniform and equipment.

“What I’ll miss the most is the kids,” said Groom, who’s mentored countless children over the decades, many of them now adults with children of their own. “The Tulalip Indian Reservation has become my home. They’ve accepted me very well, in spite of my being an ugly old white guy,” he laughed.

Tulalip Tribal member Patrick Reeves was still a teenager when he first met Groom seven years ago.

“He came up to me and asked me to join the Police Explorers, and we’ve kept in touch ever since,” said Reeves, who now has a daughter and works in maintenance for the Tulalip Tribes. “That academy was hard, but Larry kept me in. He was always there for me. If I was having hard times, he’d stop by or bring me lunch. He’s just a really good guy. No matter what you’re going through, he’ll be there to help you any way he can.”

“I just want to thank this community for trusting me with their children,” said Groom, who still hopes to continue serving as the Tulalip Tribal Police Department’s chaplain. “And I want to thank the Marysville School District for allowing me to work with them as their School Resource Officer.”

Frampton and Shepherd perform at Tulalip tonight

Source: The Herald

Grammy-winning musician Peter Frampton and blues artist Kenny Wayne Shepherd will perform on Sunday night at the Tulalip Amphitheater.

Best known for “Baby, I Love Your Way,” “Breaking All the Rules” and “Show Me the Way,” Frampton has been a classic rock staple since the release of his first solo album, “Frampton Comes Alive!” in 1976. It remains one of the best-selling live albums of all time.

Louisiana-born Shepherd has charted Top 10 singles and played with blues legends like B. B. King and the Muddy Waters band.

They’ll bring in special guests Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos for the show.

The show starts at 7 p.m.

Tickets start at $30, available at www.ticketmaster.com.

The ampitheatre is at 10400 Quil Ceda Blvd. Tulalip.

For more information, go to www.tulalipamphitheatre.com.

Baby Veronica’s Birth Mother Files Suit, Claims ICWA Unconstitutional

Suzette Brewer, Indian Country Today Media Network

On Thursday, the day after the South Carolina Supreme Court denied an appeal filed by Dusten Brown and the Cherokee Nation to consider a “best interest determination” hearing, Veronica’s birth mother filed yet another suit in South Carolina federal court claiming that placement preferences for Indian families violates equal protection provisions because the law uses “race” as a factor in custodial placement.

Supreme Court Thwarts ICWA Intent in Baby Veronica Case

But legal experts across the country have questioned the validity of the lawsuit because of the sovereign immunity of the United States and tribes from being sued without their permission.

“Frankly, it’s frivolous and without merit,” said one legal expert who works exclusively on Supreme Court cases. “This birth mother cannot show that there has been ‘controversy’ or that there is some ‘injury’ by the placement preference of Indian children with their own families and tribes. So most likely this case will be dismissed on jurisprudential grounds by the Department of Justice.”

J. Eric Reed, a Dallas-based attorney who has practiced law as a tribal prosecutor and also as a special assistant United States attorney for the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation, points to the extensive legislative history of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and the sound reasoning for its existence. Reed has extensive experience in matters related to ICWA, tribal sovereignty and international indigenous human rights.

“The constitutional questions surrounding every aspect of the Indian Child Welfare Act were vigorously debated by Congress, which enacted this legislation to protect the ultimate health and welfare of all indigenous children in the United States. Those hearings uncovered a very tragic reality in the systematic abusive child welfare practices toward Indians in state courts that resulted in the separation of great numbers of Indian children from their families and tribes through a variety of adoption or foster care placements, which are almost always in non-Indian homes,” said Reed, who is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

There are overwhelming examples, statistical data, and expert testimony documenting the evidence of these practices resulting in the wholesale removal of children from their tribal home and identity. The adoptive and foster care system operates much like the human trafficking version of ‘puppy mills’ where getting custody of a child results in increased funding for the foster operator. And private adoption agencies with wealthy clients are also in a position to entice the purchase of a child from the pregnant mother who may be in poverty. This often happens without proper notice to the Tribes or the fathers, who don’t get a hearing on the matter.”

For example, according to the Lakota People’s Law Project, nearly 750 Indian children are seized by the South Dakota Child Protective Services each year. Indian children comprise only 13.4 percent of the total population of children in South Dakota; and yet they account for a whopping 52.3 percent of the foster and adoptive placements in that state.

In March of this year, three Indian parents and two tribes represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and attorney Dana Hanna of Rapid City, filed a class action lawsuit (Oglala Sioux Tribe v. Van Hunnik) in the U.S. District Court for South Dakota. For decades, the suit alleges, Indian parents and families were denied due process in being separated from their children under the 14th amendment, as well as hundreds of ICWA violations.

Even as the parties prepare for the upcoming trial, it should be noted that the impact of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl is already being felt in Indian country. Last week, another unwed putative father in South Dakota had his parental rights terminated because of the decision.

Therefore, many legal experts, including Reed, see a troubling pattern emerging in both Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl and in the systematic seizure of Indian children from reservations across the country. Because of the recent crackdown on American adoptions by Russia and other countries, they say the U.S. adoption industry has turned toward vulnerable women in this country who may be swayed by perks, such as new cars, gifts and financial compensation in return for their unwanted children. By attempting to invalidate all or parts of ICWA, the U.S. adoption industry has a vested stake in providing children and babies to infertile couples, who are equally vulnerable to less-than-savory adoption agencies, who charge up to $8,000 per couple for a listing on their websites.

As the extraordinary drama in Baby Girl continues to unfold, legal scholars agree that while Maldonado’s suit in South Carolina against the United States and the Cherokee Nation may not get much traction in court, it reveals yet another strike at tribal sovereignty in America.

“It’s not going to fly,” said Reed. “And honestly, this case is a perfect example of exactly why the Indian Child Welfare Act was needed in the first place.”

Will It or Won’t It Cost $60 Trillion? Climate Change Unknowns Dog Methane Question

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

Debate has erupted in the scientific community as a study puts the economic cost of a mega-burst of methane that could be emitted by melting Siberian permafrost over the next decade or two at $60 trillion—about equal to the entire world’s economic output in 2012.

The study, published on July 25 in the journal Nature, based its economic price tag on the assumption that a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf “is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly,” the paper said. This will lead to higher atmospheric concentrations of methane, which will accelerate global warming as well as Arctic ice melt, wrote the three authors, Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope and Peter Wadhams.

“The ramifications will be felt far from the poles,” they said. Further, the article made the point that the business opportunities being slavered over by oil and resource companies to the tune of copy00 billion are dwarfed by this potential cost.

At issue, besides the question of whether we can expect such a methane “pulse,” is how quickly the permafrost will melt relative to how long the methane—which does not stick around as long as carbon dioxide—will last in the atmosphere. Those critiquing the study say that the greenhouse gas will not build up faster than methane dissipates, which takes about two years. In contrast, carbon dioxide, the other potent greenhouse gas, can linger for centuries, a recent study found. And melting permafrost has also been a concern in Alaska.

Antarctic Mud Tells Tales of Ancient Ocean Rise

Melting Permafrost Could Release Greenhouse Gases: NYT

Regardless of how much the dollar amount is, said co-author Wadhams, who heads the Polar ocean physics group at Cambridge University, in a rebuttal to the initial critique in the Washington Post, “the planetary cost of Arctic warming far outstrips the benefits (from shipping and oil exploration) that have been talked about so confidently by some politicians.”

The naysayer, Jason Samenow, set off a chain reaction of sorts as expert after expert came forward to concur that the methane-belch scenario is not that probable.

“The paper says that their scenario is ‘likely.’ I strongly disagree,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, to LiveScience.com. He explained that summer sea ice has nearly disappeared before, during previous warm geological eras, and did not result in the melting of methane hydrates trapped in permafrost as predicted by Wadhams and his team.

However, Wadhams said that today’s factors are different.

“The mechanism which is causing the observed mass of rising methane plumes in the East Siberian Sea is itself unprecedented, and the scientists who dismissed the idea of extensive methane release in earlier research were simply not aware of the new mechanism that is causing it,” wrote Wadhams, an oceanographer at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “But once the ice disappears, as it has done, the temperature of the water can rise significantly, and the heat content reaching the seabed can melt the frozen sediments at a rate that was never before possible.”

Either way, the current models being used to calculate climate change may be missing some key variables, simply because they cannot be known until they happen. A rash of recent studies have shown how aspects of climate change influence other factors that compound and cloud the issue.

“What is missing from the equation is a worldwide perspective on Arctic change,” wrote the paper’s three authors. “More modeling is needed to understand which regions and parts of the world economy will be most vulnerable.”

The Antarctic is not immune from such melt either. As this debate erupted, the Los Angeles Times was reporting on another study, this one published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, that found melt rates of buried ice in the Garwood Valley “that shifted from a creeping annual rate of about 40,000 cubic feet per year over six milleniums, to more than 402,000 cubic feet last year alone,” the newspaper reported on July 24.

“We think what we’re seeing here is sort of a crystal ball of what coastal Antarctica is going to experience,” said geologist Joseph Levy, of the University of Texas, lead author of the study, to the Los Angeles Times. “When you start warming buried ice and other permafrost in the dry valley, it’s going to start to melt and it’s going to start melting in a style that’s consistent with permafrost thaw in the Arctic.”

Regardless of how much the melting permafrost will cost economically, other manifestations of climate change are already being felt, especially by Indigenous Peoples. Even if methane does suddenly get unleashed into the atmosphere, could damage be mitigated if we were to harness it for energy?

Coming Clean: Historic Agreement Reached for Navajo Generating Station

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

The electricity delivery from the Navajo Generating Station will continue well into the future – while achieving significant air pollution reductions.

That was the announcement made this morning by the Department of the Interior, which said it is part of an agreement that was reached to continue the services of NGS.

That agreement was signed by the Department of the Interior, Central Arizona Water Conservation District, Navajo Nation, Gila River Indian Community, Salt River Project, Environmental Defense Fund, and Western Resources Advocates.

With the agreement came a proposed “Reasonable Progress Alternative to BART,” that was submitted to the United States Environmental Protection Agency today for consideration in developing the final Best Available Retrofit Technology (BART) rule for NGS.

“This consensus agreement among a very diverse group of interested parties is nothing short of historic,” said Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Anne Castle in a DOI press release. “Through collaboration and cooperation, this innovative proposal will not only significantly reduce harmful emissions, it will also mitigate the plant’s carbon footprint and ensure continued generation of electricity that helps power the local economy.”

NGS, while being the largest coal-fired power plant in the West, is also the single sources of nitrogen oxide air pollution in the country, contributing to ozone and fine particle pollution in the region – home to the Grand Canyon and 10 other national parks and wilderness areas according to the release. Another significance for the NGS is that it provides more than “90 percent of the power for the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the state’s primary water delivery system, and plays a critical role in numerous tribal economies.”

The EPA in February issued a proposed BART rule for NGS to meet Clean Air Act legal mandates, recognizing the important role NGS plays on the regional economy, the EPA invited alternative proposals. According to the release, a Technical Working Group that consists of NGS owners, the DOI, affected tribes and other interested parties came together and submitted a supplemental proposal. “The group worked to address the concerns of many diverse interests in the plant and to provide the best path forward for all parties, in a manner that reflects current and future economic and environmental considerations,” the DOI release states.

Emissions of nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide will be significantly reduced under the agreement, while maintaining essential operations at NGS into the future.

Key items within the agreement are:

–An 11.3 million metric tons, or 3 percent annually, carbon dioxide emissions reduction no later than December 31

— 80 percent clean energy by 2035 for the U.S. share in NGS

— $5 million Local Benefit Fund for community improvement projects within 100 miles of NGS or the Kayenta Mine, which supplies coal to NGS.

— Development of a 33-megawatt solar energy facility for the Gila River Indian Community

— DOI will provide copy00 million over 10 years, beginning in 2020, to provide financial assistance to tribes in Arizona that rely on water from the Central Arizona Project.

The release states “[t]he agreement reached today will further the objectives set forth in the Joint Statement to find ways to produce ‘clean, affordable and reliable power, affordable and sustainable water supplies, and sustainable economic development, while minimizing negative impacts on those who currently obtain significant benefits from NGS, including tribal nations.’”