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A developer is trying to push through an alternative energy project on the Navajo Reservation. It's renewable energy, but an environmental group is opposed and says the developer is offering them money to drop their opposition - also that his allies are pressuring their funders. Chris Clements of member station KNAU reports.
CHRIS CLEMENTS, BYLINE: The project would be built here on Black Mesa, on the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
RAYMOND PEACHES: There's no other place in the world that's this beautiful.
CLEMENTS: Slabs of orange sandstone the size of skyscrapers jut up near where Raymond Peaches feeds his cattle in a corral.
PEACHES: This is millions and millions of years of formation that happen, and you want to destroy it just to make money?
CLEMENTS: A French entrepreneur wants to build a series of reservoirs here that he says would have benefits beyond him profiting. His company, Nature & People First, would use solar power to pump water uphill into the reservoirs, which could then be released when the sun isn't shining, spinning turbines to make electricity. Basically, creating a giant battery.
DENIS PAYRE: It's going to help, you know, stabilize the grid, integrate more solar, avoid deadly blackouts.
CLEMENTS: Denis Payre says it would also help the reservation's struggling economy.
PAYRE: We're talking about approximately a thousand jobs during four years during construction.
CLEMENTS: Projects like this require permits from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Biden administration denied three of Payre's projects, citing opposition from the Navajo Nation government. The nation remains opposed to Payre's proposal. So does a Navajo environmental group, To Nizhoni Ani, or Sacred Water Speaks. Nicole Horseherder leads it.
NICOLE HORSEHERDER: We're just a big, huge thorn in their side, and they want us gone so that they can move forward with their project.
CLEMENTS: Emails reviewed by KNAU show that Payre offered To Nizhoni Ani $10,000 to drop their opposition. They declined. After that, a local political leader and the head of an energy industry group that Payre's company is part of stepped in. They reached out to some of the group's donors and encouraged them to back away from the nonprofit.
HORSEHERDER: I was preoccupied with that for a good eight months, and it really held up the other work that I could have been doing. And it was stressful.
CLEMENTS: Payre says he had nothing to do with the letters to funders and that the $10,000 offer was to recognize Horseherder's nonprofit for its input.
PAYRE: We tried to build bridges, and we tried to offer, you know, a cooperation and a path to a positive future.
CLEMENTS: Heather Tanana is a Navajo citizen and water law professor at the University of Denver. She says developers frequently offer communities cash in exchange for support. But...
HEATHER TANANA: What absolutely crosses the line is reaching out to individual funders because you're unhappy that they held to their own individual standards.
CLEMENTS: Tanana's opinion is that Payre's donation offer and the complaints from his supporters were not illegal. But she says they're part of a long pattern of outsiders trying to impose their will on the Navajo people, even if he's won support from a couple of local leaders.
TANANA: There's such a history of outsiders coming into Indian country with the idea they know what's right and they know how to get it.
CLEMENTS: The Navajo Nation will elect a new president in November. Payre says he'll try to convince that president to drop opposition to his plans. But the Trump administration is trying to roll back a federal policy requiring tribal consent for hydropower projects.
For NPR News, I'm Chris Clements.
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