The record, read closely · issue articles
Who is allowed to build it
≈ 6 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines
D · Draft — not verified Every quote is verbatim from a candidate’s own turn, and is their claim, not this site’s finding. Cal Nez’s questions are quoted as his. How we verify →
What Cal asked. Cal presses on who is allowed to build and who is allowed to be paid. To Charlie Smith Jr., about the utility authority: “Why can’t other entities like if you, like for instance, NECA, why can’t NECA have the ability to hook up the electricity, not just only NTUA?” To Joan Gray: “How will you evaluate and vote on major infrastructure contracts?” To Debbie Nez-Manuel: “are you prepared to halt critical multi-million dollar infrastructure projects if no qualified Navajo firms is available to perform that specific work?”
The count. Infrastructure reaches substantive discussion in 31 of the 42 interviews.
Companion page: where the candidates stand on this, one by one →
Every candidate is for roads. Every candidate is for water. That is not a finding; that is a formality, and a voter learns nothing from it. The useful question is the one Cal Nez keeps asking underneath it, and it is not what should be built. It is who is permitted to build it, and who pays when nobody is required to.
The gap is not the plan. It is the last hundred feet.
Vince James describes a business site with three-phase power running through the middle of it — and no one whose job it is to connect it. “who’s going to reline that three-phase? Who’s going to pay for it? NTUA won’t pay for it. Navajo Nation won’t pay for it.” Economic development, he says, files it under unmet needs. The power is already there. The authority to spend the last dollar is not.
This is the same shape as the seams described elsewhere on this site: not a missing law, but a place where two rules meet and nobody is standing there. A road that stops at a jurisdiction. A line that reaches the fence.
Mikhail Ganadonegro, of To’Hajiilee, gives the human version. He is running, he says, because “I’m tired from watching our families wait for years for basic things, water lines, homes, safe roads.”
Shaquille Begay, a college student, adds the piece his generation cannot work around: “We don’t have running water. There’s lack of electricities in rural areas as well.” Broadband, for him, is not a luxury item at the bottom of the list. It is the condition of staying.
NTUA: a monopoly, a lifeline, or both
Cal Nez puts the sharpest version of the utility question on the table himself — asking why NECA cannot hook up electricity, why it must be NTUA. The candidates do not answer it the same way, and the disagreement is the most substantive one in the whole infrastructure record.
Melinda Arviso-Ciocco, who says plainly that she is an NTUA customer, argues that “our people have become dependent on NTUA” and wants performance metrics attached to the Nation’s enterprises.
Eugene Badonie acknowledges the criticism without joining it: “People are very critical about NTUA.” His concern is who sits in the chairs.
Andrew Curley proposes a route around the bottleneck rather than through it — small-scale solar, contracted at the community level, to “allow Navajo owned businesses that are promoting solar to contract either through NTUA or through chapters.”
Three candidates, one utility, three different theories of the problem: dependency, governance, and competition. A voter who cares about how long they will wait for a power line should know which of those three their delegate believes.
Dr. Christine J. Benally goes furthest. She bought a house in Maryland, she says, and was offered a choice of four utility companies. “So why can’t we have a choice here? Why is it monopolized?” Her argument is technical as well as rhetorical: the grids are already connected, and she has worked at a power plant.
Andrienna Lister answers the word directly when Cal offers it — asked whether the utility amounts to a monopoly, she says: “It is a total monopoly.”
FINDING
Four candidates use the word “monopoly” in these interviews. Only one applies it to the utility authority on her own initiative — Dr. Benally, who asks why the Nation has no choice of provider. Andrienna Lister agrees with the word after Cal Nez supplies it. The other two apply it elsewhere: Titus J. Nez to the Nation building gas stations, Jerilynn Yazzie to a different arrangement entirely. The distinction matters, because it is easy to remember a claim as having come from the person who was asked rather than the person who asked.
Jurisdiction is the second cost
In the Eastern Agency, land is checkerboard — tribal, allotted, state, federal, private, in alternating squares. Cal Nez asks Joan Gray about it directly, and asks what her legislative plan is to move funding across those lines. The candidates who represent those chapters know exactly what it means: a simple road grading or a utility line contract can sit for years while offices decide whose it is.
Jamie Henio’s answer is not a promise but an instrument. He describes chapter maps showing where the schools are, the housing, the roads — “Where the power lines are at. Where the water lines are at.” — broken down by demographics, chapter by chapter. You cannot prioritize what you cannot see.
Marsha Greyeyes lists the same objects as a legislative program: “waterline housing initiative, senior centers, powerline extension, road improvements” — and argues that every one of them requires advocacy at the committee level to survive.
What nobody said
No candidate, in any of the 42 interviews, stated how many miles of Navajo Nation road are unpaved today, or how many households lack running water or electricity. Those figures exist in federal reporting. They were not spoken here.
Nor did any candidate name the section of law that decides who may connect a utility line. Several named the entities. None named the authority. That is the same absence this site finds everywhere — and the same reason: the current consolidated Code is not published anywhere a candidate, or a voter, could read it.
Silence here is not evidence about any person. It is evidence about the record.
TAKE ACTION
Ask the candidate on your ballot three questions.
In my chapter, which project is stalled — and is it stalled for money, for land status, or because no office is required to finish it? · Should another entity be allowed to connect electricity, and what would that take? · Who pays for the last hundred feet?