Siletz.Net

I've been asking Tribal Chairman Delores Pigsley for months about the illegal payments to the Election Board in 2007, and receiving few answers. Today I asked her:

We know that the Election Board was paid over the past three elections. This directly contradicted our law in place at the time, which said that "Election Board members shall serve without pay." In the Nesika Illahee you said our elections were fair and legal. How could the payments to the Election Board be legal?

Chairman Pigsley responded:

This was not an illegal election. The election needed to go forward, council agreed to let the staff people receive their pay. Were it not for them the election could not go forward. What would you have done?

I answered:

In answer to your question: I would have obeyed the law.

One thing you could have done was change the election ordinance as you did in September and November of 2008. But I would have made it legal to pay any tribal volunteer to serve on the board, not just hand-picked staff of the General Manager - because we need an Election Board that is independent of the Tribal Council and the General Manager for our elections to be fair and impartial.

You say the Tribal Council authorized paying Election Board members. I have two follow-up questions:

1. How did the Tribal Council have authority to ignore the election law which stated "Election Board members shall serve without pay"?

2. There is was no resolution passed by Tribal Council authorizing such payments. There is no mention in the minutes about Tribal Council authorizing such payments. Where is the record of this authorization?

Our recent elections have been illegal in an even more fundamental way. None of our last three elections was certified by a legally appointed Election Board. Our law clearly states that “The Election Board shall be appointed by resolution of the Tribal Council”, but none of the members of the Election Board for our last three elections were appointed by resolution of the Tribal Council - they were all illegally appointed by General Manager Brenda Bremner, while Tribal Council ignored it's legal responsibility. Chairman Pigsley has tried to cloud this issue, suggesting that Bremner only recommended appointments. That's not true; Bremner made all the appointments for our last three elections herself, in direct violation of our law.

Clearly it could not be legal to pay Election Board members when the law said they must serve without pay. Tribal Council has no constitutional authority to exempt the General Manager and the Election Board from our laws. And isn't it just terribly convenient that this illegal authorization was granted without any mention in Tribal Council minutes or any other public record? Did Tribal Council really even vote on the payments, or was this just a "tacit agreement" with the Tribal Council sitting silently while Brenda Bremner explained her illegal policy?

Last September the Tribal Council amended our election law to allow tribal staff members (only) to be paid for serving on the Election Board. Obviously there would be no need for this amendment if the payments received by the Election Board over the last three elections were legal already. Note that Tribal Council could have authorized paying any tribal member to serve on the Election Board. Tina Retasket was paid over $40 an hour to serve on the Election Board in 2007 - does anyone imagine there would be a shortage of volunteers if that same pay was offered to all tribal members?

So why is the Tribal Council only willing to pay tribal staff to work on the Election Board? Because that staff can be hand-picked by the Chairman's niece, General Manager Brenda Bremner. And a politically loyal Election Board comes in very handy when, for instance, you need to prevent an opposing candidates statement from going out to all tribal members in the voter's pamphlet.