Montana tribe accuses feds of underfunding police services
Monique Merrill
(CN) — A majority of a Montana tribe's accusations of shortfalls in law enforcement funding will proceed to trial, after a federal judge on Tuesday greenlighted all but one of its claims against the government.
While Fort Belknap Indian Community argued that the federal government violated the Administrative Procedure Act by relying on outdated and incorrect data for its funding allocation, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Johnston wasn’t convinced.
Ruling from the bench, Johnston dismissed Fort Belknap’s claim brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, finding that the a Supreme Court decision precluded the claim as it concerned an agency allocation of funds from a lump-sum congressional appropriation.
However, Johnston determined that the tribe's remaining claims for breach of contract and anticipatory repudiation would be best settled at trial.
Fort Belknap argued in a Tuesday hearing that the Bureau of Indian Affairs' reliance on outdated funding methodologies prohibited it from receiving budget increases for law enforcement. As a result, Fort Belknap says that it can’t recruit and retain officers, maintain essential infrastructure and suffers from a lack of resources.
The Fort Belknap initially sued the federal government in Montana federal court in 2022, accusing it of not providing adequate law enforcement services on Indian land. The Fort Belknap Indian Community comprises the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes that share the Fort Belknap Reservation in north-central Montana.
The tribe says the Office of Justice Services — the division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that oversees law enforcement funding — only partially approved Fort Belknap’s proposed funding agreement for 2023, approving only $1.35 million rather than the $5.19 million the tribe requested.
The tribe also accused the federal government of routinely declining its funding proposals without justification.
For the government’s part, it acknowledged Tuesday that funding shortages are a large problem in Indian Country.
“If Congress had appropriated enough money, enough funding to fully fund every tribe's actual law enforcement needs, we wouldn't be here today. We just wouldn't,” said Randy Tanner with the Justice Department. “So the question is, with limited funding from Congress, what is the Office of Justice Services to do?”
The government argues that Fort Belknap’s claims are time-barred because the claims challenge agency decisions made over the last three decades. In 1999, Congress directed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to set the funding amounts for law enforcement rather than allowing the tribes to allocate the amount themselves.
“The tribe was aware of what the funding was in 1999 and what it was awarded and very easily could have challenged the decision then if it had wished to do so,” Tanner said. “But the six-year limitation has passed now, and they haven't.”
As a contracting tribe, Fort Belknap receives funding and handles its law enforcement needs independently rather than having the Bureau of Indian Affairs operate law enforcement, as is the case with direct-service tribes. Fort Belknap accused the government of allocating more funding to direct-service tribes than contracting tribes.
The government, in turn, argued that if it were true that contracting resulted in less funding, there would be more tribes opting for direct services.
Fort Belknap argued that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was required to calculate how much it would have spent if it were running the law enforcement program before setting the base funding amount, but failed to do so.
“There's no discretion there, they have to determine that amount. So, then going forward, everything that they've done — no matter what formula they use, no matter how much they say is fair — it's irrelevant because they never determined how much they would spend if they were running the program at Fort Belknap,” argued Terryl Matt, attorney representing the tribe.
Johnson noted while ruling that there was a dispute of fact as to whether the government met its obligation to prove it provided funding equal to what it would have provided had it directly operated the program in 2022-2023.
“That's what you're really saying in count two, ‘it's not a breach of contract, it's a breach of the statutory obligation to fund us,'” the judge said.
That claim will proceed to trial, currently set for June 23, though it may be pushed back if Fort Belknap submits an amended complaint seeking damages for all six years within the statute of limitations.