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Tribal governments
Q: What about tribal governments?
MR. REILLY: I am very proud of what we did with tribal governments. I took very seriously the law's treatment of tribes as states and proceeded to delegate real authority to them when we judged they had the technical capacity to exercise it. Not all tribes do. Some do, more are getting it. I particularly was proud of delegating water quality authority to the Pueblos of New Mexico, a group of 12 or 13, which I visited, which clearly had the requisite expertise and capability and were threatening to impose some fairly large costs on Albuquerque by requiring much better water pollution control on waters that then flowed through tribal lands. I can recall a visit to a newspaper in Albuquerque where I was questioned quite strenuously on this point and simply said that the tribes, under the law, were entitled to this authority. They had been getting water delivered by Albuquerque that was unacceptable and they ought to exercise their power to get Albuquerque to shape up. But I said that they were not stupid and they were not, obviously, going to shut down a city of 250,000 or make it spend a billion dollars on water quality cleanup. I thought the Indians would behave responsibly, but that Albuquerque had better take them seriously. That was my objective and I think that's pretty much the way it turned out.
The tribes have a huge amount of land in the United States. I was startled to discover how much land they have. There has been a tendency for waste to go their way and for some of them to accept waste in return for contributions to their needs. I think, to be consistent, we have to respect Indians' rights to make those decisions and if they wish to have a solid waste landfill on their property, provided they have the capacity to make a judgement about it and monitor it and control it and oversee it, that's their prerogative. Not everybody agrees with that, but you can't have it both ways. You can't both defer to their authority and their expertise and legal power that they exercise provided they meet a certain standard and say, not so fast, when they want to use it to accommodate a waste facility. I remember getting an award from the tribal groups and I thought we advanced the ball in recognizing the growing maturity and responsibility of tribes in the United States.