The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously on Monday to instruct the city’s Department of Water and Power to participate in an regional expertise-sharing program with the Navajo Nation.
The “Light Up Navajo” program was launched to bring water, electricity, mobile and internet to citizens of the Navajo Nation residing on reservations in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
It has been estimated that about 15,000 Navajo families do not have access to the power grid. Thus far, the “Light Up Navajo” program has delivered power to more than 900 of those families over the course of two work phases. The third phase has been scheduled to launch next year.
“These mutually beneficial goals include LADWP’s own linemen and women to train, to travel to the Navajo Nation [...] to give [them] expertise,” said Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, who introduced the motion and is a member of the Wyandotte Nation. O’Farrell is chair of the city’s Energy, Climate Change, Environmental Justice and River Committee.
“It’s a jobs program for them and it’s a jobs program for us,” he said.
LADWP was the second California utility to join the program, along with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
O’Farrell characterized L.A.’s participation in the program as a kind of reparations. The city purchased “inexpensive by duty” power from a Navajo facility in the 1970s, he said.
“Los Angeles ended a 40-year agreement back in 2014 with the Navajo Nation, where we purchased dirty coal to power up the city of Los Angeles, providing only modest financial benefit to the Navajo Nation while polluting the area and earth around the nation,” he said.
The city is reportedly working on a new energy purchasing agreement with the nation, which will be 100 percent renewable. It is expected to come before the city council for a vote early next year.
