AFTERNOON SESSION

Chairman ASHLEY. The subcommittee will come to order.

This afternoon the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development continues its oversight hearings on the Indian and Alaskan Native housing program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Our panel of witnesses this afternoon will be comprised of Mr. Wendell Chino, president, National Tribal Chairman's Association; Virginia Toews, representative for the National Congress of American Indians; and the Honorable Overton James, Governor of the Chickasaw Nation.

I understand Mr. Black, executive director of the National Tribal Chairman's Association will be joining us.

Now, let me say at the outset that I am most pleased to greet you this afternoon. And I must tell you that we take very seriously these oversight hearings, and your contribution will be of very considerable interest to us.

I know that many of you have come from long distances, so I greet you all the more warmly. The only reason, let me say, that we do not have fuller attendance is that the House has an enormously busy schedule these days. Members will be coming from and going to other meetings.

I have a message from our distinguished colleague from Oklahoma, Wes Watkins, who wanted me to extend a cordial welcome to all of you, but particularly to the Governor of the Chickasaw Nation, the Honorable Overton James. So I am pleased to do that, in his absence.

Congressman Watkins, some months ago, was importuned to accept an important engagement at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he was obliged to leave to catch a plane just a little while ago and will return to attend the hearings just as quickly as that engagement is fulfilled.

So, again, I welcome each of you to this panel. And I will be happy to receive your testimony in whatever order you care to proceed.

So, Ms. Toews, if you care to proceed, we will hear from you. Is that agreeable, or did you have something else in mind?

STATEMENT OF VIRGINIA TOEWS, REPRESENTING THE NATIONAL CONGRESS OF AMERICAN INDIANS

MS. TOEWS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Honorable Chairman and members of the Subcommittee on Housing, my name is Virginia Toews and I am speaking on behalf of the National Congress of American Indians and its 156 tribes. I welcome this opportunity to speak on the issues of Indian housing as it relates to the fiscal year 1981 budget.

We have submitted a written testimony and request that the record remain open to submit further written information.

Chairman ASHLEY. Within what period of time?

Ms. TOEWS. Within 7 days.

Chairman ASHLEY. Well, I think that we can make that accommodation. We will be happy to have your statement in full, together

with such information to submit. We hope you will bear in mind that we need to be somewhat judicious at this juncture in what is permitted for the record.

MS. TOEWS. Thank you.

I have several specific issues that I wish to address.

On page 3 of the written testimony, I will read the first half:

The Presidential budget request for 1981 proposes to cut Indian housing assistance for American Indians from 6,000 to 4,000 units. This represents 33%-percent cut. This is the largest cut proposed for any Federal housing program. The budget request submitted by the administration includes 20 million in contract authority to construct up to 4,000 units of Indian housing. The unit projection is based on a total development cost per unit of $50,000 and a 4.4-percent inflation factor. Yet, the December 1979 Department of Housing and Urban Development's report to Congress on Indian Housing estimated the 1979 average total development cost per unit of Indian housing to be $54,256.

In addition, unlike past years, the budget request does not provide for separate ACC amendment money to cover unanticipated increases in construction costs in public and Indian housing projects. In the Indian housing, particularly, HUD has tended to underestimate the true development cost and hence has relied on amendment funds to carry out prior unit commitments.

which really reduces the 4,000 units in the estimation—as near as we can come, in the expertise that we have, would probably only build 2,000 units to begin with.

I would like to call your attention, Honorable Chairman, to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Indian Programs Region 8 annual report of fiscal year 1979, and on page 2 the report says:

Region 8 consists of 26 federally recognized Indian reservations, representing approximately 95,000 Native Americans. Of the estimated 19,000 Indian households in the area, 9,000 have been housed by HUD's public housing program. An additional 3,000 public housing units are in the pipeline. The average population growth rate per year for the region's Native Americans is approximately 3.9 percent, which represents 3,700 people.

And if you translate that into housing, that represents 740 units per year, an increase that we would need per year. These unmet housing needs will continue to grow, resulting in severely substandard and overcrowded housing conditions.

The budget cut for this year doesn't even take this into consideration, and we recommend that your committee seriously look into this matter and rectify the dollars that are set aside for fiscal year 1981.

No. 2, further, the budget request does not provide for additional money to carry out resident training counseling program requirements outlined in the Federal Register from December of 1979. Heretofore, the Federal Register has a "thou shalt" in it that says that Indian housing authorities should provide up to $5,000 in the construction budget for home buyer training.

Now, this is camouflaged in the new budget of 1982 to the extent that the new regulations also include low-rent units for counseling purposes. To do this, you are also then reducing the funding that is available for new construction. And therefore, if you are looking at 3,000 units or 2,000 units, you are now narrowing it down to perhaps 1,500 units, because of the extra funding that is needed to carry out the requirements in the Federal Register.

No. 3, the substandard housing is not addressed nor included in the housing budget for Indian people. There is no accurate record of

substandard housing. And one of the things that we would like to suggest to the subcommittee is that Congress would mandate to HUD that within 1 year that they gather demographic data and publish it on substandard Indian housing. And as a positive vehicle for accomplishing this data gathering, we would recommend that National American Indian Housing Council do this, since they are committed to Indian housing totally; and then that Congress then would address the issues of substandard housing on Indian reservations. When you take into consideration the report that came out of just the Denver region alone, you can see where this is really building up, and that the new starts are just not there.

The fourth issue I wish to bring to your attention is the Triagency agreement. I understand that this morning it was addressed, and we feel that the Triagency agreement needs to be discussed in greater detail than it was. The problem that we have with this is the slow housing starts. Indian housing authorities are out there dealing with a lot of agencies, not only the Triagency. And the Triagency is to be there for technical assistance as well, onsite assistance to Indian housing authorities. And these services are becoming less and less.

When an allocation of units are given to an Indian housing authority, it is usually in the very early spring of the year. And HUD, in their outline, indicates very strongly to Indian housing authorities, "We want these houses under construction by June, July, August. There is no way, Mr. Chairman, that this can be possible. First of all, you are dealing with a mutual help participant. You are looking at the tribal planning board, the tribal land community, heirs, the tribal council, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, the BIA roads. You are looking at the architect, the civil engineers, the soil investigations. And there is no way in the world that Indian housing authorities can get those starts in the same year that those units are being allocated, and it is a very complex problem. And we really need to take another look at the Triagency agreement, and would request that this be done.

One of the answers we feel to this problem would be a separate execution of an annual contribution contract, specifically for site improvements, that would happen at least 2 years ahead of time so that we could answer to Congress, "Yes; we do have all the housing starts. Yes; we have them built. Yes; they are occupied. And, yes; they are taken care of."

I thank you for this opportunity to testify.

[Mrs. Toews' prepared statement, on behalf of the National Congress of American Indians, along with a supplemental statement, follows:]