Earlier this month, J.D. Tovey was appointed the executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation following a vote by its board. Tovey is an enrolled member of the CTUIR, and he had been serving as the interim executive director since last May.
An urban planner by training, Tovey was appointed by Gov. Tina Kotek as co-chair of the Housing Production Advisory Council in March 2023. The council finished its work with a report released last year containing recommendations on how to meet the state’s target of building 36,000 new homes a year over the next decade.
Tovey joins us to talk about his work on the council and his priorities for the CTUIR, including the development of the Nixyáawii neighborhood within the Umatilla Indian Reservation to ease the housing shortage for tribal members. He also shares how the Trump administration’s policies and directives could affect tribal relations with the federal government.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. J.D. Tovey was recently appointed to be the executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Tovey is an urban planner by training and was appointed by Governor Tina Kotek to be the co-chair of her Housing Production Advisory Council. That council finished its work with a report released last year containing recommendations on how to meet the state’s ambitious goals to greatly increase the number of new homes.
J.D. Tovey joins us now to talk about housing, the Umatilla Indian Reservation and more. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
J.D. Tovey: Good afternoon, Dave. Thanks for having me on today.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. You served as the interim executive director of the Tribe since May, and now the board has voted to make you the long-term leader. What does it mean to you to be the executive director of the Tribe?
Tovey: Oh, it’s deeply humbling, first and foremost, to represent the people of the Tribe in all the work that we do with all of our regional partners. It’s just deeply humbling. Yeah, I had people stop me in the grocery store. They have a lot of concerns, needs, and then they ask me to try to resolve those. Then I work with my team here to try to resolve that. So I would say it’s deeply humbling, a little scary. I mean it’s a big organization. I think we’re much bigger than most people realize, but I’m actually pretty excited. This is an amazing board. We have an amazing organization, and some amazing projects and work we’re doing here.
Miller: What kinds of things do people ask you when they stop you in the grocery store?
Tovey: What are we doing about housing? What are we doing about economic diversification? What are we doing about the pothole down in one of our housing projects? I mean, that’s the whole gamut from top to bottom and a lot of that comes through my office. We process it, get it out to departments and start reviewing it. We manage the entire reservation plus a lot of off-reservation property within our ceded territories that goes all the way from Tri-Cities in the Hanford Reach area, all the way down to Ontario. We also have a lot of tribal members within that area and treaty rights, so we are heavily involved in all those areas, too. A lot of people, I think, have concerns or at least questions about our engagement with our regional partners.
So, yeah, it’s everything. I’m never surprised by a question that I get.
Miller: The first one you mentioned, though, was about housing: what are you going to do about housing? Can you give us a sense for the housing needs on the reservation or, more broadly, for tribal members?
Tovey: We have a unique situation here. Most of our land is under tribal trust status with the federal government. The shortest issue with that is that it’s difficult to get loans against those properties because it’s under trust with the federal government. So availability of land …
Miller: Meaning, because you can’t use the land as collateral because you don’t technically own it?
Tovey: Exactly
Miller: OK.
Tovey: Correct, yes. So the federal government holds the title status of the property, but the individuals own the beneficiary title of those properties. So it’s difficult to get loans against that property. Those are the two biggest challenges I think we have here on the reservation – availability of land and availability of even being able to get a loan on the property, once you do have one.
We’ve developed a few projects, programs and products to basically try to alleviate those situations. But there’s also the full range of housing needs, everything from especially housing for elders, veterans, transitional homes, apartments that people just want to rent, all the way up to mid- to high-income home ownership for our tribal members. So we’re really addressing all of it.
We did have a housing study done in about 2017 that demonstrated we had about 350 home deficit over the next 20 years, with 250 of those homes deficit at that time in 2017. That doesn’t sound like a lot, 250 homes, but if there are three people per home, that’s more than 20% of our population for our membership. So we have a pretty significant challenge to overcome in the coming years.
Miller: My understanding is that one of the projects that the Tribe has undertaken – and this effort started almost nine years ago – it’s called the Nixyáawii Neighborhood. What’s the idea behind this?
Tovey: It’s a piece of property that’s owned wholly by the Tribe, so it’s under tribal trust status. But we want to create a process by which people can be able to build a home there. And not only just own a home or have a home to live in, but also enjoy the benefits of home ownership, which is wealth generation, generational wealth passing and all those things, equity development for better financial stability – all those things that come with the benefit of owning homes.
Because we’re federally-restricted – there’s something called the Nonintercourse Act that doesn’t allow us to sell tribal trust lands – what we can do is create 99-year leases on those lands. Those are like ownerships that the tribal members can actually acquire, those leases for 99 years, and then it’s like ownership that they can then use that as collateral. So we basically separate out the development rights and the permitting rights of that piece of property, and then give that to a travel member who then can build a home on that property. So we own the land underneath it, but then they own a lease on top of it that can be used as like ownership.
Miller: Have people moved in yet? It was nine years ago that this idea was born.
Tovey: Nine years. There were many hundreds of hours of review here in the organization. We had to get that code and leases approved by four federal agencies. We don’t have a title office here in the traditional sense, so we had to create that. And after nine years, we just completed our first house about four months ago. So we have a bunch more, I believe eight that are looking to be built in the next six or seven months. But it was a long process to get that first house.
Miller: How does being an urban planner affect the way you think about your current job?
Tovey: I think, as an urban planner, we’re closely related to landscape architects, so I think of things spatially in many ways. I hate to say, I don’t feel like I’m a good bureaucrat and maybe that’s a good or a bad thing. I don’t know, but I think that ...
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Tovey: I’m obsessed with space. So it’s like the distances, the walkability. It’s not just building a house over here, but like, how can you actually access that house to the services? Is it walkable to our Yellowhawk clinic? Is it walkable to work? Can people walk to school? Is it generating traffic where kids are crossing roads to school?
So it’s not just the solution that we’re trying to find, but it’s also like all the unintended consequences of our solutions. And I think that’s one characteristic that a lot of urban designers and urban planners kind of meld in, those unintended consequences of our solutions. I think that’s the nature of planning, too. We spend a lot of our career fixing unintended consequences of our predecessors.
Miller: As I mentioned, you served as a co-chair for Governor Kotek’s Housing Production Advisory Council, which made its final recommendations about a year ago. You’ve been thinking about housing for a long time, but I’m wondering if you learned anything important as a member of that group?
Tovey: Oddly, I think the biggest lesson I think we all learned from everybody is, one, how much impact we really have in the state. During that time, there were a lot of international tariffs that were going on. I think wood prices were going through the roof and we didn’t have much ability to impact that. We can only control what we can control within the state of Oregon. So I think we spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways to mitigate those external impacts that come into the state of Oregon …
Miller: Let me make sure I understand correctly. So the governor got all these housing-adjacent people together to come up with recommendations for how to overall let the state greatly increase housing production. And you’re saying the biggest lesson that all of you learned was how little power you have at the state or local levels to do that, given how national or international these forces are?
Tovey: Yes. I don’t want to say it’s like we have little power. I think we have quite a bit of power within the state of Oregon, but those are pretty big impactful things.
Miller: Interest rates or inflation?
Tovey: Yes, interest rates and inflation were hugely impactful. When the sheet of plywood goes from $14 a piece to $32 a piece, that drastically compounds the price of a home.
Also, I think the other big surprise was a lot of the regional differences – same problems, just different flavors of problems across the state of Oregon. An electrician here in Pendleton, Oregon, might cost more than an electrician in Portland, just because of the availability. So homes here end up being disproportionately more expensive than in other places because of just the unavailability of some of the workforce. That was another thing we identified during the process: workforce development in order to be able to fill these jobs, everything from permitting, all the way up to electricians, plumbers, woodworkers, everything.
Miller: I want to turn to the new administration. One of the first in a flurry of executive orders was a freeze on federal payments for grants and loans. That order was then rescinded and is now on hold, pending lawsuits. But when that order came down, can you describe what went through your mind?
Tovey: Interestingly enough, at the time that memo was issued, a lot of our leadership and a lot of the tribal leadership in the Pacific Northwest was actually in Portland for the Affiliated Tribes of the Northwest Indians Winter Conference. We talk about policy, interactions with administrations and initiatives that are going on across the Indian Country. So there was a lot of conversation. I think it completely changed the flavor of the meeting that week. So there’s a lot of conversations around that and people are really kind of shifting their priorities.
We worked with my staff back here in Pendleton. We got some memos drafted and are trying to figure out how to respond to it, because there’s a lot of concerns. We’re pretty heavily grant-funded, either through the BIA or through other agencies throughout the federal government. So there were obviously a lot of concerns about our status and our availability of funds.
I will say a lot of our funds, the portals to do drawdowns were put on hold almost immediately. Then as soon as it was stayed by the federal court out of New York and then rescinded by the Trump administration, they mostly started opening back up. So I can say right now, to my knowledge, all of our grants, portals and interactions are open back up. But it was a big consternation. It was a roller coaster of a week. You’re trying to react, trying to find out what’s going on. By the time you get a phone call over with, two more emails will come out from the federal government …
Miller: That conflict with each other? Or, I mean, that they go in different directions?
Tovey: Just changed the direction or kind of added more context. Then also, a lot of our coordination was with our federal partners. All across the organization, they have relationships with their federal agencies. And even they didn’t know what was happening either.
The night that memo was issued, personally I was on the phone with some representatives from the Indian Health Service, and they knew as much as we did. They didn’t have any idea what was going on, if they’re going to have jobs, so there was a lot of consternation. But then 48 hours, [as] we’ve seen oftentimes with Trump, [there] has been a bunch of chaos … 48 hours, walk it back a bit, call it a victory. And then we go on to the next crisis. So I think we’re going to see more of that over the next 40 years.
Miller: There have been reports of members of the Navajo Nation and of the Mescalero Apache Tribe being questioned or detained by immigration officers. Those were both in the Southwest. Has that happened in recent weeks to members of the CTUIR?
Tovey: None that I know of. This question just came up again yesterday at our monthly general council that we had just yesterday. So our recommendation to our tribal members is to have your tribal I.D. on you and to reach out if there’s any questions. To my knowledge, no one here has been questioned. And to my knowledge, ICE has not been operating here in the reservation. It’s my understanding, too, that even Umatilla County and Morrow County, who are kind of our regional partners, have come out in a news article recently stating that they’re not cooperating with ICE either.
So like I said, we’ve kind of moved on to the next crisis, and that one seems to have kind of filtered away in some way.
Miller: We just have about a minute left, but relationships between the federal government and Indian tribes are unique. They are nation-to-nation relationships, as opposed to, say, a grant to a humanitarian nonprofit. Does this current administration, which has broken so many norms, recognize that difference?
Tovey: We just received a notification from the secretary of the Department of Interior, asserting our unique relationship with the federal government as a sovereign nation. And a political entity and not just a racial demographic. Then the new Health Secretary Kennedy asserted something similar. I think it was more in passing than a formal memo, basically stating the same thing, that they recognized that tribes have been disproportionately affected by negative health outcomes and recognizes our unique status as political entities, rather than just racial demographic.
Miller: J.D. Tovey, thank you very much.
Tovey: Thank you. Have a great day.
Miller: You, too. That’s J.D. Tovey, the executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.