 Today we have a real treat, as you'll see. I got a little preview of it this morning. I think you'll find it extremely fascinating. First, I'd like to acknowledge pre-court co-director Sally Benson, who actually brought this topic and these speakers to our attention. Next, the person that she learned about this subject area and specific study, Catherine Sandoval, who's an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University. And one of these long, I'll do your resume backwards. So professor of law, public utility commissioner in California for six years before that, Stanford Law School, before that, the usual Oxford Road Scholarship degree, and before that, the small little liberal arts college in New Haven, Connecticut, named Yale University. No competitive juices there at all. I'm sure we've heard this before. And she had just recently written a book on this topic that Sally and she had discussed. So it's a very fascinating kind of book about environmental justice, who some of us are now getting more involved in the specific killer case study that really, I think, makes the chapter that Catherine penned is on the URAC tribe, which is about six hours north. So she was able to convince two people, the director of, from the URAC community, the director of planning and community engagement, Peggy O'Neill. And one of her star staff people, Eugene Gino O'Rourke, something about Irish and Native Americans going on here. The text had come down. So as I understand it, it'll be a three-way talk and really focused on this very excellent example of a general theme, which I think is increasingly important here and all over the world. So with that, I'll turn it over. I think Catherine is the first speaker. They have kind of a mixed slide deck. So take it away. Great. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Weyers. So well, thank you so much. And thank you for being here. And again, thank you to Stanford for the invitation. So my name is Catherine Sandoval. As was mentioned, I'm a law professor at Santa Clara University. Also a graduate of the Stanford Law School. And before going to Oxford and Yale for college, I started life in a trailer park in East LA. And then my family moved up to the barrio where we got to live in an apartment. And then we moved to Montabello. And actually Peggy and I figured out that we both lived in Montabello. So I, like some of you here, was a first generation college student. And so I think also my experiences as a Latina from East LA have also made me very interested in working with communities that are disadvantaged communities. And when I was a commissioner of the Public Utilities Commission, I was appointed by Governor Brown, served a six-year term from 2011 through 2017. I think one of the most important projects that we got to work on was coordinating with and ultimately supporting the work of the Yurok tribe that is located here in California on the Klamath River that parts of the reservation still lack access to electricity. And parts of the reservation now have access to electricity thanks to the tribe's leadership, and particularly that of Peggy O'Neill, who has been working on these issues for many years, as well as the whole tribe. And one of the things that I hope that we also get to talk about today is how energy, internet, which I also teach communications law as well as energy, law and contracts, energy, internet, and water are interconnected infrastructures. So when you lack one, especially electricity, it is going to drive the lack of communications and internet, which also drives poverty. And part of what I've argued in my book is that infrastructure poverty is structural poverty. It is community poverty. And so a lot of our strategies in the United States tend to focus on alleviating individual poverty, or even family level poverty, whereas this infrastructure poverty really takes a different approach. So I will have at the end of the slide the information on how you can order this book. So this is actually a chapter of the book called Energy Access is Energy Justice, the UROC tribes, trail-based in work to close the Native American Reservation Electricity Gap. So as mentioned, we're going to do this in a relay. So I'm starting out with some of the observations from my chapter about why, what drives this gap. And then Peggy is going to talk a little bit about the UROC's projects to close the gap. So first, worth underscoring is that in the continental United States, Native Americans living on reservations are the people in America most likely to lack access to electricity. And that is still true today, although this is an issue that is not well-quantified. And so this is definitely an area where we need more research. And in fact, this is a real gap here in California that we actually don't know how many people don't have electricity. But one of the questions that we ask is also we're all taught in school that the Rural Electrification Administration electrified America. So why didn't it electrify Native American reservations? Well, for one, they didn't make Native American tribes eligible. So when you looked at who could apply, the boxes of categories that could apply, tribes could not apply for the grants. And we'll see that that is still an issue today, where there are a lot of grants and programs that tribes are not eligible. So in California, the places that tend to lack access to electricity the most are Native American reservations and farm fields. So the Rural Electrification Administration electrified the farmer's house, but not the farmer's field. And so this is part of what drives especially diesel generators to be out in the fields, largely for water pumping, and then contributes to the terrible air, particularly in the Central Valley. So California is home to 109 federally recognized tribes, more federally recognized tribes than any other state. And so the area that we're going to be talking about is represented here in the slide on the right, the Urock Reservation. And you see there along the Klamath River. And of course, what is the Urock Reservation is a very small percentage of what has been the historical territory of the Urock tribe. The Urock tribe dates to time immemorial. And then as you had really with the Gold Rush, the United States pushing up into this area, the Urock as well as the Hoopa tribe, the Redwood tribe, and many others were pushed into much smaller areas. OK, I don't know what's going on. Why is this? We've got updates happening. OK, can we cancel the update? OK, let's not do that update now. OK, let's stop the check for update. OK, I'm not sure. Red button. OK, there you go. See, I love students. They tell us what to do. I teach communications law. All right, so here this is on the right. Actually, this shows what was the combined Hoopa and Urock Reservation. The area along the river was called the addition. That area was actually added to the Hoopa Reservation by President Grant. And then the Urock Reservation itself, which is basically the area along the river. So the reservation goes for approximately 40 miles. One mile on either side of the river was created in 1988 with the Hoopa-Urock Settlement Act. So what is amazing is that somehow in the Great State of California, this area got skipped when it came to electricity and other infrastructure services. So Javier Kenny, who's the interim executive director of the tribe, observed in a 2013 interview that swaths of homes don't have electricity, phone, or internet service. And in fact, Gina was telling me that when he moved from Hoopa back to the Urock Reservation to Wichpec in your first year living there, you didn't have electricity. And Tracy Stanhoff, who's the president of the American Indian Chamber of Commerce of California, observed that utility infrastructure and services often stop just outside the border of many Native American reservations. In fact, they often go around them completely. So this is not a problem that is unique to California, but I would like to suggest that this is related to a number of issues having to do with federal policy or the lack of federal policy, as well as federalism and the role of the states. So we see here a stunning picture that was taken by my former advisor Bill Johnston of the Urock Reservation in the Klamath River region of what is, since 1850, been the state of California. It is a stunningly beautiful place. But it is a place where electric and communications infrastructure was largely absent prior to the Urock tribe's infrastructure initiatives that really began in 1990. Although Peggy was saying that her mother-in-law says that they had the old cranked telephones in some places upriver, which were probably a remnant of the logging that had gone on during that time. So I thought it was also important to start before we get into the why with the impacts and how big these impacts are. So this is the Jack Norton Elementary School. It is a state of California school that has been run on the Urock Reservation since 1959. It ran on diesel generators full time until August of last year. So thanks to the work of the Urock tribe and to the planning department leading this effort, they got electricity in August of 2018. So not only did the school district spend a lot of money on diesel generators, but if any of you have studied about diesel, it is very polluting, very harmful to human health, as well as something that we now increasingly recognize as a driver of climate change. It's a two-room schoolhouse. These are the younger kids. And so when we were there, Gino and Peggy and I were there in November meeting with the kids where they had just converted over to electricity and we had met with them many times before when they were still on diesel generators, we asked them, how did they like it? And one of the kids said, I can now hear the forest. And then another kid said, I can now hear myself think. But half of them still don't have electricity at home. And neither of their teachers has electricity at home. So there are still remaining needs. And so the absence of electric infrastructure has contributed to ill health, poverty, has also limited economic and social opportunities. And as we said, the high use of diesel generators is something that has contributed to pollution and to climate change. So this, I think, is an area that is worthy of more study. You can see what the diesel generator was like there on the bottom. So actually through some concerted action as well involving Dr. Smith at Berkeley and our collective work lobbying the Klamath Trinity School District, we got them to change to a propane generator. So now when the electricity goes out, as it did recently for five days, at least they're running on a propane generator and not on diesel generators. So when we think about why does this happen? Why in America and why in California do we have people in California who don't have access to electricity? And so as a professor, I started looking into this issue and really came up with several major themes that continue to drive this gap. So these are federal policies to fracture tribal identity, to fragment tribal land holding, to funnel tribal resources to others, as well as federalism, right? And the role of the states and particularly when states do not even consider the issues that affect Native Americans as they change policies. And fundamentally part of the problem is that the federal government has never made providing infrastructure, including electricity, telecom, water services, and other services to Native American reservations a policy priority. There is some money through the rural utility service that is underfunded. They keep threatening to cut the budget, cut out RUS entirely, but it has never been a priority. And one of the things that we talked about earlier is that there also are some federal policies that for example create a duty to forest management, to evolving standards. But as any of you who've studied environmental law know that sometimes you have to kind of argue backwards, right about protection of the trees in order to get to service of the people because these laws are really geared more towards trees or fish than towards people. So this is an example of part of the fracturing of tribal identity, which was accomplished largely through fragmenting tribal land ownership. And so the Yorak Reservation really encompassed a huge part of the Pacific coast and then areas going inland down the Klamath River. But as the federal government then created these reservations, also part of what they did was basically privatize a lot of the land. And so much of this land is owned as well by logging companies as well as by individuals, both tribal and non-tribal. So one of the things that Peggy will talk about is how this resulting checkerboard of land ownership and the lack of condemnation or eminent domain rights by the tribe has really complicated efforts to build infrastructure. As in order to actually get condemnation, they would have to have either the county or utilities such as PG&E could exercise condemnation rights or to undergo very extensive negotiation. So the idea here of the fragmentation and fracturing really had one of its greatest expressions through the Dawes Act of 1887. And so wielded like Thor's hammer at the heart of reservation, this act sought to basically break up reservations with tribal consent. And then the idea is that when all the tribal land was allotted, the federal trust relationship would expire and the reservation would be abolished. So the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Matz versus Arnett characterize the Dawes Act objective as extinguishing tribal sovereignty, erasing reservation boundaries and forcing the assimilation of Indians into the society at large. So the other point of this policy, right? Fracture tribal identity, get people to stop behaving in a tribal manner and identifying with tribe, fragment tribal land ownership was in order to funnel tribal resources to others. And this is really exemplified through what I call the dam period, right? And we see in the dam period, the building of very large dams throughout America in the 20th century, which reflected not only the federal government's view of land and water as something to be tamed and brought under control, but also as something eligible to be funneled to others. And so in 1948, the federal government launched what they call the Western Reconnaissance Mission to determine whether there were surpluses in the Klamath River that could be redirected elsewhere. And when you look at actually the report, I had the opportunity to look at the report and my book chapter discusses this. One of the things that I found, there's everything defined that is dismaying about the entire proposition. But one of the things that's also striking is that the report, the Western Reconnaissance Report does not mention the words Yurok or Hoopa or Redwood or Kaduk or the names of any of the tribes there. It doesn't mention Native Americans or Indians. It doesn't mention that it was then a federally recognized reservation. So this is an example of what I call bureaucratic erasure. That they just erased the tribes out of the history book which then also would have made their proposal easier. So this is a picture of one of the dams on the upper Klamath River. And so their interim report had detailed this plan to dam the lower Klamath River where the Yurok now lived. And this would have also flooded where the area where the Hoopa and the Kaduk lived. And so this would have been, the dam would have been called the Opa Dam where the Opa Tributary is now. And then they were gonna build a tunnel, a 222 mile tunnel to connect in the Redding area and then bring the water down through the Bay Area down to Los Angeles. So this dam would have been as tall as the Trans-America Pyramid in San Francisco. Would have been the tallest dam in California. And the only reason that this dam wasn't built was because of the objection of the city of Los Angeles because the idea that the Bureau of Locomation had would be that they wanted LA to give up their rights to the Colorado River water in exchange for water from the Klamath area. And LA refused to do that and that was part of why this dam wasn't built. Well, when you look at the report, the report also mentions that there were only relatively minor improvements than existing and in order to build a hydroelectric dam you would need transmission facilities. And so if they had local distribution facilities those would have had to have been dismantled. So coveting this area for dam construction, the federal government didn't fund construction of electric distribution lines or telephone lines to serve local residents. In fact, it had a disadvantage. And Peggy has told me that her relatives and people that she knows were told, look, this whole area is gonna be flooded out for a dam. Even after basically this proposal was pocketed, the proposal never really died and they told loggers to take everything possible because this is actually still on the books today and hasn't been retired. So there were still plans to flood this entire area. So as I mentioned, this is an example of bureaucratic erasure where this report omits mention of the tribes and the areas to be flooded. Doesn't mention tribal sovereignty or tribal rights. Doesn't mention that the Hoopa Valley Reservation was a dam site and proposed inundation zone. So as we mentioned that these aspirations to appropriate tribal water resources deterred investment in electric infrastructure, which again is particularly ironic. I put at the bottom here, what if the UROC creation miss? Right now, the people will have enough to live on. Everything that is needed is in the water. And this is from the UROC creation story, how thunder and earthquake made ocean. And so the damming in this area is still a major problem in terms of fisheries and access to fish and food. So another big issue here is about the federal recognition of tribes and the role of the tribe in being able to represent itself in both federal and state proceedings. So following the 1951 publication of the Reconnaissance Report, proposing to flood what was in the Hoopa Valley Reservation and that was the joint reservation that was also extended by President Grant, the Hoopa tribe organized in 1952 in accordance with the Indian Reorganization Act and obtained federal recognition. And then in 1988, the Hoopa-UROC Settlement Act was passed by Congress and then it basically split the reservation into two and then recognized a separate UROC and Hoopa Reservation. And so this initiated also whereas the UROC had been recognized before by the federal government in a different way. This recognized the authority of the UROC tribe. It actually specifically says in the act that the UROC tribe are conferred the authority or recognize the authority to form in a way that would lead to formal federal recognition. And so they adopted the UROC Constitution in 1993. And this is also important because one of the things that you look at in terms of the process of federal recognition of the tribes, right? It's important for us to recognize that the whole process of federal recognition is something that the federal government made up. It's not inherent to indigenous tribes, right? This is a way of recognition that is effectively imposed on tribes. And so, but with this recognition, the federal government also now supports tribal staff. And so this has been critical to the creation of the planning department and the ability of the tribe then to be its own advocate, to then advocate and apply for grants to help to build the infrastructure. So the last major theme driving this gap is federalism. And I say this having been a former commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission. So coupled with the absence of federal policies to provide infrastructure access to Native American reservations, this really drives the gaps because states are in charge of electric distribution lines, as well as telephone line last mile, internet last mile, water services, sewer services. And many states, including California, shifted in the 1980s and 1990s from policies to promote universal service to policies focused on cost recovery. So actually, California in the mid 1990s focused on a cost-causers pay policy, whereas earlier in the century, basically you see these applications from PG&E that says, for example, we want to extend electricity to serve a sawmill in Glen County. And then the PUC would issue a one to two page decision finding that in the public interest. So then you and I, all of the rate payers actually our parents or grandparents would have paid as part of our bills for the extension of electricity. But by the time that the UROC tribe was federally recognized, then the policies changed and the PUC never considered at the time that they changed the policy, that there were people who still lacked access to electricity. And so under this policy, CPC rule 15 and rule 16, in order to extend a line once you get beyond an allowance, right? And like the allowance could be, this quad is really huge to this complex, right? Even from one end of the complex, this square to another might be within the allowance, right? But certainly if you were going all the way over to where like the church is from this building, you would definitely be beyond the allowance. So once you get too far, then the electric line extension rules kick in and the minimum that is charged in order to extend the line is $40,000 a mile. Now Peggy was saying that especially as they have had to add on and get farther upriver, the costs have been more like $500,000 a mile. So you can ask yourself, okay, if you needed to pay $40,000 to have electricity and another $40,000 to have telephone service at your apartment, would you have that now? How many of us could afford to pay $40,000, let alone $500,000? So this is why these rules really drive community poverty. But both state and federal policies didn't adequately consider unserved areas including Native American reservations. So tribal leadership has really been key in closing these gaps and addressing these gaps. Many tribes have wanted infrastructure for more than a century and the UROC tribe has been a leader in really not only wanting infrastructure but deciding as a tribe that it was important. So Dino UROC is with the planning department, his father was for many years the chairman of the tribe and your father told me, he said, we decided our tribe has existed for millennia but to be successful in the 21st century and for millennia to come, we need the internet, right? We through our tribal dances can talk to people but we can't talk on the internet and we wanna talk on the internet and they've recognized how important that was. So in 1990, the tribe began participating in a CPSC proceeding called Smith River Power versus PG&E and through this proceeding they were able to through a settlement get a small amount of money that they used then to help to fund matching grants and really through their great stewardship have basically nursed these matching grants for 25 years and so now that money has run out and so they're having to look at new money but even when you look at it, my book chapter talks a little bit about the history of this proceeding. Smith River Power had originally proposed to basically build a transmission line that would have with the permission of the UROC crossed the UROC reservation to the Hupa reservation and really provided a backbone for power that would have dramatically reduced your cost but ultimately the settlement that the PUC approved gave PG&E and Smith River the ability to choose between building the line that way or going along the coast and they chose to go along the coast. So as a result, this is part of what has impelled the need for the tribe to basically lead and be electric developers to develop the line themselves. So with this, I'm gonna turn over this portion of the presentation to Ms. Peggy O'Neill and Peggy's gonna talk about their 20 years of leadership in progress. It was a lot younger when I started this. I didn't have gray hair. Good afternoon. My name's Peggy O'Neill. I'm the planning director for the UROC tribe and I have been since the year 2000. These are my two favorite pictures for this project so I put them first so you can see and I'll explain them. You can see the terrain that we're dealing with. It's not an easy flat surface so it's been very challenging and very costly to put power in there. This particular shot, and this is a real, it's not a Photoshop, it's a real photo of the military. There's a program called the Innovative Readiness program through the military and they actually go out and do practice missions in areas in the United States and they came out and they've done some of our power lines, some of the more difficult areas. So this was, they loved coming out there but unfortunately we went into war in the Middle East and they weren't able to come back because they were actually in Baghdad and Afghanistan putting back utilities that were blown up when they had the war so that was kind of ironic. We couldn't get power but they were over there doing it and the other picture on the other side is my other favorite. This is, the smaller pole is a pole that was built by a land owner using trees that were in the area and he created his own hydro system and he had his own little, his family all had electricity based on their own homemade hydro system and their own poles and then you see the larger pole was the new pole that we put in, PG&E put in and they had a standoff because each side said I'm not turning mine on until you turn yours off and the other one wouldn't turn it off until they knew they had power and so finally we had to mediate the two groups so that we could continue on with our project so those are my two money shots. I've used this one in grant applications and it's been very, very lucrative. So in 2000 I came to work for the tribe and there's a lot of things that the tribe needed and I didn't just work on electricity, we needed phones, we didn't have internet, we needed road work, we needed buildings, we needed all kinds of things and water systems, we have surface water systems so this was just one of the things that we had to work on power and my educational background is I have a business degree in accounting, not engineering but by the time I'd got to the tribe I'd been working in Northern California now for about 40 years for tribes and I had done both accounting, economic development and construction but I had never done a project like this but the council said we need you to do this and so we tried to put our arms around well how were we gonna do this and we looked at renewables and alternative energy and this is 20 years ago and so solar was more expensive than it is now and they didn't have the battery backup that they have now so we started looking at different options, we did hydro studies and wind studies and solar systems and everything in our area because of the weather we have and the tree cover everything requires more than one type of energy other than the grid and so finally after a lot of studies we did an in river hydro system study I went back to the council and said we need a grid we need to have the grid and then we also need renewables but we've got to have a grid and this project should have taken maybe a couple of years if I could have pulled it off in a couple of years if I didn't have a lot of obstacles which I'll tell you about so in 2001 we started our first project and we've done them in a series because we couldn't do it all at once we went through and we have to do the environmental we have to find the funding and we were really fortunate we went back and lobbied and told our story to anyone who would listen and the RUS has a high energy cost program so if you can prove that you're in a very high you have low income people that pay a high percentage of their energy their income for energy then you can qualify for the program and so that was our primary funder we also went to the CPUC we went to HUD you know there was a variety and we had our own some we had about a million dollars in trust funds that she spoke about earlier and we used that to leverage we'd throw a couple hundred thousand dollars into a grant application and we got 17.4 million dollars over the years and we proceeded to try to build this grid which Gino's done a map over there of the various projects that we did we wanted to make sure that we could have phone service so we had to design it to include phones so that required higher polls PG&E held us to a very high standard much higher standard than I think anyone has ever been held to they made sure that everything was up to date and state of the art in some cases they weren't even making some of the parts yet that we had to come up with but they made sure they never made it easy for us and I could write a book on that but after this is a map of where the people live on the reservation for the most part right now and there's sort of a disconnect it's not that people didn't traditionally live in some of these other areas but because of roads now and vehicles they used to travel by boat and there were villages all along the river people are concentrated now in certain areas and so it shows that we have two power companies we have Pacific Power and we're the end of the line of two power companies the end of the line of Pacific Power from the north they bring down hydro power and then we're the end of the line for PG&E so then there's this disconnect in between about I don't know how many miles about 20 miles in between where there's no electricity so when we're talking about bringing electricity it's only still to a portion of the reservation and we've had a lot of resource extraction that's gone on over the years it started with the salmon and water that's been removed and taken to other places the redwood trees, the fir trees now we've been endated by cannabis growers so there's been a lot of taking resources out of this area not much putting back and she talked about the dam which would have really put almost half of the reservation would have been underwater and then the other half at the mouth would have been a little trickle of water coming down but we still have a lot of people that don't have electricity what we did to qualify for the grant funds we had to go through and look at what does it take to get through a day on the Uruk reservation without electrical grid you had to have kerosene lights, batteries you had to have propane appliances a propane refrigerator is a couple thousand dollars you had to have chainsaws and trucks and firewood, most people lived off of the heat from trees that they were cutting down so it really cost a lot of money so most people didn't use much electricity they might fire up the generator to watch TV a little bit they had a propane refrigerator but then they would go and get these five gallon or like you put on an RV because they couldn't afford to fill the 200, 300 gallons worth of propane in a big tank and they just operate with little small tanks of propane so one of the biggest I'm probably not going to follow all the slides exactly our biggest obstacles were getting the funds and like I said we went back in lobby to get those we went back, I remember I'd never been to DC before and I'm not really one that likes to go around lobbying or talking in large groups but I went back to DC they lost my luggage and I was lobbying back there and my tennis shoes and my jeans so I think that they thought we must really need money because I looked pretty pathetic I had to wash my clothes out in the sink at night so I think RUS sort of adopted us and they kind of were committed to helping us get to the end of the road and there was a couple of times we had to go back and say we don't have enough money to finish this project and they dig around and say well we think we can add a little bit to your budget and they've done that to us twice and I really I'm really thankful for that I'm not sure how much more they're gonna fund us but they at least fund us to get down to the end of the road and to get the school we have four surface water systems in that area and surface water systems are very expensive to operate and they require telemetry which runs off of electricity or we tried solar but that never worked year round so not having electricity has so many impacts that most people don't they just take for granted like you couldn't have food stamps at the store and you can't use the internet and there's a lot of things that you couldn't do up there that renewable sound really good but without that backbone you couldn't have net metering you couldn't have without telephones there's a low cost telephone program that you can't participate in you can't have reverse 911 there's a lot of things that we all take for granted that nobody there could have so we had one of the biggest obstacles besides PG&E and like I said I could write a whole book on how hard they made it for us even though we were paying for everything but the hardest thing that I really felt was the power to condemn right away we didn't have that right that's only given to utility companies to Caltrans, to counties but not to tribes so as we were going down they wouldn't even work on right away unless we paid in the PG&E so you'd have to pay PG&E for the project and then they would identify who the landowners were and then you would go about trying to get right away and I could also write a book on all the stories about right away and that we went through to get it but the last swath to get to the school was five years to get right away from one individual and it cost us a lot of money and we were finally able to get it but no one would step up and help us in that regard sometimes we'd have our legal department go out and start a probate for somebody because we have land that had probates within probates, within probates people never do probates because they didn't have the money to do it so we would go find a likely conservator and say, hey, if we start your probate for you will you sign our right away and they'd say, okay, sure so our legal department would write up all the paperwork go to court with them get them named by the judge to be the conservator we'd get them to sign the right away I had all my staff became notaries so that we could get a right away at the drop of the hat because you never knew when you were gonna run into the right person we had to find people that were missing people that hadn't been seen in years to try to get right away and so that was the hardest besides PGD, that was the hardest getting the money was the easy part building it was not that hard we could build anything we used a couple different methods to build it you can go out, PGD gives you a choice you can have them build it which usually costs more or you can go out and get contractors that are approved by PGD and then they'll build it for you so and then we also use the military which we had to sell PGD on that concept but the militaries are reservists and so they're actually the East Coast equivalent of the PGD workers they work for utility companies they're not just military alone they actually have jobs the rest of the time so we used all three methods when we'd come to a really hard section we'd make PGD build it because if not they'd just put us through the ringers and the contract would have change orders and change orders like this last swap was underground utilities and it went through some very bad sections so we said PGD you can build that one and so they had to build that one and then then we still had delays because then they start having the fires in California so all their workers had to leave the area so they sat on our money for about two years so these are some of the reasons that I mean if you're engineers out there and you're looking at renewables they sound really good and you know you wanna be able to do them but there's obstacles and you have to look at those and what I found is that you have to have about three different sources of energy to get through the year during the winter you can't use solar it just doesn't work during the summer you can't use hydro because your water flows go down and they degrade and so the next error the error that Gina will work on because I'm gonna be retired will be to look at renewables once you have that backbone in that grid but when you put a solar system in for an elder which they had tried to do it's very expensive and very problematic for them to keep it operational without having the grid as their battery backup so we did all these studies and we're looking at, we looked at biomass we live in a forest it makes sense to have biomass but the technology hadn't quite caught up yet to where it is now when we started this project and so you look at biomass but it's expensive to go get it and to haul it around because you have to pay high fuel costs so you have to look at all the pros and cons is your technology the right size for what your needs are and sometimes you have to have multiple uses if you're gonna go with biomass so we're still wanting to do all of these things but if I'd known it was gonna take me 20 years maybe I would have thought differently but I thought maybe five years to get the grid in but it's taken literally 20 and we still have more to go so I don't have a whole lot more to say I'd be willing to answer any questions you might have I think at this point I have a few more slides you wanna see all of my slides if you wanna talk about this one well this is the kind of housing that we're dealing with just so you know like one of the things is you have to connect the homes in order to get rebates back from PG&E because when they price it you can't figure out how they do this but they come up with a price and they said do you want this option or that option and we always took the cheaper option but after you connect everybody to the electrical then you get a rebate so you have to get everybody connected well when they live in houses like that that have never had electricity PG&E is not just gonna go in and turn on the electricity so in addition to doing the grid we also had to have a program to try to upgrade the electricals in their homes so that they could accept it so each home we had a budget of about $5,000 because we were being pretty frugal because most of these houses need to be tore down so we didn't wanna go through and spend $20,000 on upgrading their electrical and putting panels in and you've gotta have a vein on the top to make sure they don't get electrocuted if there's an electrical storm so we would have to go in and do a minimal amount of work so they could have a refrigerator and some plug-ins and TV and all that but not a full electrical rehab because it was just a waste of time really so let's see what other slides does she have so you wanna finish this up? This is the last part of the relay and we can do some of this together so thank you These are her slides, the end ones Right, so we can talk together so this last section is also just on suggestions so we've heard a bit about the gap both generally in the United States on Native American reservations on California reservations including the York Reservation so what are the next steps? How do we solve this? So one is that I think we agreed that the federal government should make it should prioritize and fund infrastructure to Native American reservations of course in consultation and with the consent of tribes and I say that this is a federal responsibility because the federal government basically created Native American reservations as federal enclaves by taking Native land so I think that the federal government needs to take responsibility for infrastructure funding I also think that the federal government should not require these very high levels of matches some of the programs that you have done or also the complicated I'm a very good grant writer I have probably brought in three or $400 million in grants in my 40 years of doing this and so every grant though requires that you jump through somebody else's hoops that don't necessarily fit your project and so if you're putting in electricity and you need to put in electricity they shouldn't have all of these obstacles to make it almost impossible CPUC does the same thing you know they were funding landline telephones they've decided now to jump to broadband but you know we still need both but there's always somebody and someday maybe some of you will be sitting in a position to write some of those NOFAs for state or federal agencies make sure you take into consideration that you know if you put in too many things I understand you have to have accountability but if you put in too many obstacles you sometimes cut tribes out because tribes cannot meet all of those obstacles we don't always have lots of matching funds like Department of Energy requires a 50% match well there's a lot of projects I'd like to do but I don't have 50% match to do them right and then as we've talked about there are a lot of programs where it to you know you have to be a subdivision of the state to be eligible so in fact we're talking about one of the issues that will come up is going to be with the PG&E bankruptcy so we were talking about could the tribe adopt their own community choice aggregator but apparently the state of California legislation that authorized CCAs do you know you said the word that they used was it's public agency public agencies which are not interpreted to include Native American tribes so that means that under that legislation tribes are not eligible to create a community choice aggregator so we can go back to the legislature at least that's a California bill get a whole new bill get tribes in but this is an example of some of the problems so to address the matching grants there is a need for philanthropic help and as well as for governments to rewrite the criteria so that you don't write tribes out of the criteria like the rural electrification administration did and the York tribe is also going to be using its 501C3 to also seek matching grants I also recommend and my book chapter recommends that the CPC should open a proceeding to evaluate the electric line extension and service rules for unserved or underserved areas such as Native American reservations they've adopted these rules in 1990 without even considering Native American reservations in addition that this is something that has come up very recently that the analysis of the electric utility or energy utility restructuring with PG&E's bankruptcy that is taking place at the PUC at the same time PG&E has now filed for bankruptcy I believe it is imperative for both of these proceedings to consider Native American tribal issues and reservation issues to also have tribal representatives and one of the things that I talked to Peggy and Gino about is that because of as you build lines then they can get basically a rebate from PG&E as people sign up for the lines this makes them creditors who are eligible to participate in the bankruptcy as a creditor of PG&E which gives you a seat at the table but it's important in both of these proceedings that the tribes have a seat at the table and a voice as we look at if we are going to be restructuring PG&E how do we do it in a way that helps to address these gaps and really create a safe, reliable service at just and reasonable rates which is the tribe wants what everybody else in California is guaranteed do you have anything to add here? No, I think that what she's saying about the state and I think it's got to be on purpose because I can't believe that so many people could always do this but when the state writes a law or they write a funding or they have bonds if they don't say Indian tribes specifically are eligible they will not fund tribes so we have to sometimes go through the county to get funding from the state and I don't understand that I don't understand why someone hasn't figured this out and it's universal that if it's cities, counties, nonprofits, it should also say tribes because if it doesn't say tribes they will not fund us and then this means that you have to go to somebody else who somebody else becomes the decision maker about whether or not you get funded so we need more academic studies about this issue so there have been a few studies that have been done through the Shats Energy Center and these at Humboldt State and studies largely done by the Urock tribe but we need more documentation about the Native American reservation electricity gap and other infrastructure gaps we need more coordination on this and one of the things that also Peggy mentioned is that there's a huge need for energy efficiency and other services one of the things that we did when I was visiting there in November is we brought up some people from PG&E with us to really start the coordination because now that they have energized the line so some of the people who live in houses like what you saw are now eligible for state of California programs like the energy infrastructure programs, the energy efficiency programs here's really I think the greatest irony the people who have no electricity and have been running on diesel generators are ineligible for California's energy efficiency programs for the investor-owned utility programs and for as well the energy assistance programs that California alternative rates for energy because they're not customers of any electric utility so the poorest people have not been able to access these programs and other are federal programs but the federal programs are actually the poor cousin of our state programs and so I think that this is another issue that again this is a world that we have created and in the world that we created you had to be a customer of the utility to be eligible but we didn't think about the fact that there were some people who were still not customers of the utility so all of these issues need to consider how do we increase tribal economic opportunities and social opportunities as well as respect tribal sovereignty and then last on that the tribal consultation is key so this is another picture where you see the beautiful York Reservation this is their headquarters building in Wichita Peck so there's Geno's dad on the right terminal work as well as several other members of the council when I had the opportunity to visit in 2016 to discuss our desire to work with the tribe to study some of these issues including the impact of the diesel generators and to work with the tribe to see what we could do to help to address the Native American Reservation infrastructure gap and the needs on the York Reservation this is information on my book chapter and so we're gonna be posting the slides so that you'll be able to see how you can get information to be able to order the book I would like to encourage you to encourage your libraries to as well order the book actually when I checked the other day and it's on back order but if you email me I can get you a coupon for a discount for it but if we can get your libraries to buy it then hopefully they will publish it in paperback and we need more studies on this I think when I started working with tribes I didn't know what the term environmental justice meant I just know that when something's not right it's not right and so I always walk into the room with I don't care what you say and I don't care what that NOFA says this isn't right and I try to train my staff don't just take somebody what they tell you is the fact you dig into it and you find out well why not why aren't we eligible and just it's gone a long way to be successful in us being able to get ahead not only with phones and power but roads we have atrocious roads but we've been able to bring in millions of dollars in improvements to our roads and our water systems we've done $20 million worth of improvements to our six water systems that we have but everything is a big challenge when you don't have electricity you don't have phones and you don't have broadband because everything is so interconnected so those are the things that we have to we have to get out of the way so that we can do things like economic development we did build a hotel in a very small casino to provide employment up there but it's really hard to do anything until you get those matters out of the way that infrastructure so in the future the next generation they can work on renewables and they can work on economic development people could have home-based businesses they can do their telemedicine and they can all of those things that everybody else gets to do this is just the beginning because even though we've done these projects for 20 years we still have probably another 20 years worth of infrastructure work that needs to be done by the next generation but I am retiring I retire actually from my position on the 15th of March so and I don't know what I'm gonna be doing some work for the tribes still but this is taking its toll I mean these are like dog ears working for tribes not that they don't need people and that they don't pay well and they don't respect you and appreciate I feel totally appreciated for all the work that I've done working with the tribe my children are Yurok my grandchildren are Yurok my husband's Yurok so my heart's in that place but the next generation, Geno's generation has to pick up the torch and continue on now and I'd like to say also it has really been a pleasure working with Peggy, with all of the leaders of the Yurok tribe both when I was a commissioner and then also back in academia I could not have written this book chapter without you Peggy and so thank you so much for all of the help and really we did this through partnership you know our goal at one point I said to Peggy I feel a little funny telling the story but she said we're busy building the line and we need you to tell the story and so working together we need the help of all of you to help make sure that like when we met with those kids and they said they loved being able to hear the forest and hear themselves think but they're still dependent on diesel generators at home and both teachers still have diesel generators at home there's more work to be done so you can learn more about the Yurok tribe through YurokTribe.org Geno has agreed to also share his email address so Geno can also be your contact and here's my contact information at Santa Clara University and we'll make the slides available so with that once again thank you so much to Stanford University my alma mater and also to the Precourt Energy Institute for your very generous invitation and we'd be happy to answer a few of your questions so thank you very much. I would like to say I really appreciate you coming here to share this story with us perhaps all of us can as you just suggested help shine some light on the injustices that you've uncovered and make them less onerous for you and others and personally I really admire the work you've done to kind of stick with it and get the job done, as Peggy just said. So any questions particularly from students right in the center there? I'm not sure what rate on the next student or whether this is continuing and whether you want to actually sit in there. We didn't have a choice on the up river because that's where the power was and there's that disconnect. I don't know why but they decided to make our life miserable and we were told this by people that retired while we were doing this project they would come back and say they aren't making you do things that I've never seen. There was forms we had to fill out they'd say well you have to GPS all the poles I had my staff running all around the hills putting tags on poles doing all kinds of things and they said well you know and we were just trying to be helpful and do everything because they'd say well we can't electrify the lines until you do this and then we can't do it until we do that and this just kept going on and on and finally the final straw was we were doing a line and you have to understand we're in the Emerald Triangle so if you don't know what that is it's the cannabis capital of the world so all around us are cannabis growers and we're having to get right away and so we're having to go through and wave and all this illegal activities going around that people had automatic weapons and so we're trying to do everything we can and then finally the final straw for me was they said you have to pay to upgrade the utilities because all these cannabis growers are gonna be growing year round once they get electricity and I said that's it I'm done I'm really done with you guys you have asked us to do all this stuff and we've done everything you've asked us but I am not paying to upgrade the utilities with federal funds because it's federally still against the law to grow cannabis so that you guys can make more money and I'm done and I said we have documented everything you've asked us to do we have stacks of emails that we've accumulated and that's it I just said we're gonna sue you and I just made that up because I had no power to do it now I'm gonna sue you I turned into that Erma Brombrek or whatever her name was at Sue P. Genie and now I can see a screenplay and that's a good retirement job for you so they brought in a new manager and the new manager was a woman and I thought this is great because these guys and they were guys are not gonna give her any more respect than they gave me or the other ladies because we were all women working on this project and they weren't used to dealing with women and we were good at what we did we built things all the time so we could run around and I had one worker who actually had a baby on her back running around the hills keeping up with them and so the new manager comes in and I give her that I'm gonna sue you speech and she's just like floored she's like showed up like what do you mean you're a sue me and she said give me a chance I will turn this around and she did to her credit she's the manager of the Humboldt County facilities and she did a really good job of getting those people out of the way that were giving us a hard time and I think part of it was they really didn't see eye to eye philosophically with your people or with the growers that we had no choice they were there and we you know you can't just skip over land when you're doing power you've got to go and you know so you had to get right away from the growers too and you couldn't go in there and say well I'm gonna have you thrown in jail you know they wouldn't give you right away and no one was condemning right away so we had to play nice with them and that's just a little taste of you know some of what we had to go through another question back here let's take these two and that one then I think we're gonna have to wrap it up you still haven't had these 20 years if we're much more technical than you initially imagined and so my question is with hindsight being 2020 looking back on the difficulties and challenges you faced what would you have done generally and how does this impact how you plan for the future now? well I wish that I'd had legal help and I asked for it a lot of times but no one really took me seriously because I think they thought we had it all under control but I wish that we would have sued them earlier and said you need to condemn for right away and you need to stop the behavior that was dragging this project on we could have done this project in a third of the time I think that was that's what I would have done if someone would have I might have had to go to law school to do it myself because I couldn't get that kind of help you have to understand that the Yurok tribe is doing a lot of things I don't know if you know much about us but they're also removing dams and the upper climate there's a lot of competing interests and they kind of treated us like well you guys are you got it under control so that was something I would have done differently so it sounds like I mean this is a social equity problem without any legislation helping you almost the opposite in some cases or you said with the wording it's almost like social or federal legislation is against you you kind of became an expert of getting around that over the last two decades how did you do that like how do you come into the room? like I tell people you don't have power unless you walk into that room and you act like you have it and I do that and I've learned to do that over time and not to back down and so when you walk into a room you walk into that room like we deserve power and you need to give it to us and you know the same thing with the cannabis I was involved in a lot of the cannabis stuff and we were on the negative end of that and it's like if you think we're going to put up with this we're not we're not going to allow you to legalize cannabis and destroy our reservation and that's what was going on you know so you just kind of have to bring that out and just say this isn't right these people deserve more than this and I'm going to fight for them and they kind of start listening and they do know they're doing the wrong I think and they do know that if they got sued they'd probably lose so and I think through these you know partnership opportunities I actually learned about the UROX work through through some meetings that were having on broadband internet and then learning about wow you just energized a certain part of the electric line in 2013 and then they said oh well and we have a grant from Verizon which was actually awarded by the PUC in 2008 it was fully paid in 2010 and they still haven't performed on the telephone service and so basically at the PUC I was a commissioner at the time I talked to several of my colleagues and I talked to the communications division to find out what was up and why they weren't performing well they said well it was the electric line we needed the electric service to be completed well guess what the electric service was completed so then I'm calling Verizon and then mentioned they said oh we're going to finish it in a couple of months couple of months come they don't finish it so I said guess what I'm using my platform so I started talking about it on the dais I talked to other commissioners I got other commissioners talking about it on the dais still one excuse after another and finally I called the western region CEO of Verizon and said I am going to the UROC reservation on April 2nd and I look forward to being able to make a phone call to you from the UROC reservation on April 2nd at 1pm from the school and I'm going to make that call to you and I'm so excited that everything is going to be working by that and he said yes ma'am everything will be working by that so we had a guardian angel that we didn't know about for a long time we didn't know she was back there pushing for us yeah one more quick question I'm wondering if there's some way you can tunnel through some of this regulatory morass possibly by creating the city where you want service from PG&A you know in terms of the state declaration Melpitas for example in 1915 they came separately incorporated I don't know what it's well we're not we are an Indian reservation we are an Indian tribe so we don't have to be incorporated that's we are a legal entity and so we can't make ourselves subjected to state laws because that's against our sovereignty as a federal nation that predated the state and that's a shortcut answer but so this is part of the legal issue right is that tribes are not a subdivision of the state right counties, cities but we're tax payers right and they are part of the state of California but they are federal enclaves this is actually part of what has driven as well as condemnation issues driven infrastructure to go around tribes in some places and the lack of any federal policy to serve tribes so but I think that there are opportunities for example with the community choice aggregator legislation and as we look at things like PG&E's bankruptcy and how PG&E should be reorganized it is imperative to look at where are there access gaps that remain how do we maintain affordability and reliability and especially where they are is a very high wildfire danger area and the wildfires are also part of what create issues as well right now with solar because you see the pictures of the beautiful forest this is a bit of sun right here but often it's very shady and then often nearby they have forest fires and so the fires also make the solar very unreliable so even on a great day on a great day in certain parts of the reservation you might get power from solar for an hour right and so then you're running on diesel generators and other things for the other 23 hours and so this is why we really need to look at what do we need to do to promote reliability as well as to make sure that there is maintenance in this high wildfire danger area we have a question over here