A member of the BIA’s departing Biden leadership team remarked about the key role agriculture plays in Native economies.
He was apparently unaware that sales of crushed rock, sand, and gravel (construction aggregates) put nearly seven times the revenue into tribal pockets that growing crops do.
Despite amassing over $200 million in revenue per year and ranking as the third most valuable trust resource, these humble rocks, which can be found on most reservations, literally “can’t get no respect,” – leastwise from the BIA.
The BIA is not doing an adequate job of identifying aggregate deposits on trust lands or keeping track of removals of this valuable mineral.
When we last checked, the US Department of Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue reported that it had only 19 aggregates leases on Indian lands. Yet Indian Country geologists are familiar with single reservations having more than 19 gravel pits.
Aggregates are used in virtually all construction. They are also used for making cement and concrete products, road coverings and road base, filtration systems, plaster and gunite, railroad ballast, and roofing granules, and stabilizing roads, maintaining golf courses, and controlling snow and ice.
Anyone skeptical of aggregates as a generator of jobs and revenue in Indian Country should visit the Ft. Independence Paiute Tribe of California where residents enjoy a booming economy based on mining, improving, selling, and delivering its alluvial gravel.
With technical assistance from the BIA’s Division of Energy and Mineral Development (DEMD), the tribe launched its own quarry company, Grinding Rock Aggregates (GRA), to operate four ongoing mining projects that produce 1,500 tons per day of high-quality aggregate suitable for a variety of construction projects. GRA also operates a state-of-the-art refining facility.
DEMD projected that the company would generate net profits of more than $3 million a year in the second through fifth years of its operation and $200 million in revenue through 2030 based on a production volume of 18 million tons of aggregate. DEMD estimated that GRA would achieve a five-year rate of return on investment exceeding 100 percent.
GRA has been approached by both the California Department of Transportation and the LA Department of Water & Power to furnish aggregate for general highway, dam, aqueduct, and environmental remediation projects. Inyo County, the China Lake Naval Weapons Base, the BLM, and US Forest Service also became customers.
How did Biden BIA bureaucrats reward DEMD for this success? They dismantled the program, laying off or driving away most of the aggregate specialists retained on a labor contract!
Figuratively, the BIA may still be living in the 19th century when crops were primary economic drivers. If so, they need to do a time check and start taking aggregates seriously.
They can do this by rehiring the DEMD’s specialized contractors, who in this age of personnel streamlining literally pay for themselves, then set about replicating throughout Indian Country what Ft. Independence has done.
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