Free Joint Status Report - District Court of Federal Claims - federal

Case 1:02-cv-01383-MMS

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IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF FEDERAL CLAIMS

SAMISH INDIAN NATION, a federally recognized Indian tribe, Plaintiff,

v.
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Defendant.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Case No. 02-1383L (Chief Judge Edward J. Darnich)

EXHIBIT 4 TO PARTIES' JOINT STATUS REPORT

January 8,2007

Case 1:02-cv-01383-MMS

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U.S. Department of Justice
Environment and Natural Resources Division

Devon Lehrnan McCune Natural Resources Section 1961 Stout St., 8th Floor Denver, Colorado 80294

[email protected] Telephone (303) 844-1487 Facsimile (303) 844-1350

December 19,2006 VIA E-MAIL and U.S. POSTAL SERVICE Anne D. Noto Sonosky, Chambers, Sachse, Endreson & Perry, LLP 1425 K Street, NW, Suite 600 Washington, DC 20005 Re: Samish Indian Nation v. United States, Case No. 02-1383 (Fed. Cl.)

Dear Ms. Noto, This letter regards our telephone conversation of November 15,2006, and your letters of November 13,2006, and December 15,2006. I have conferred several times with agency counsel with both the Department of the Interior and the Indian Health Service about your proposal that agency officials meet with you to discuss your discovery requests. At this time, the agencies do not believe such meetings would be productive. Interior will provide additional information, in light of your correspondence and believes this information will make such a meeting unnecessary. MS will also be supplementing its discovery responses to further detail its search for responsive documents, as well as its record-keeping policies, and, therefore, does not believe a meeting or a stipulation regarding IHS funds would be necessary or appropriate. Your letters clarified some aspects of your discovery requests for Interior. Based on this clarification, Interior has located a number of documents that it believes, coupled with the corresponding congressional appropriations, answer your discovery request with regard to the Bureau of Indian Affairs' ("BIA") Tribal Priority Allocation ("TPA") program. Interior publishes the BIA's budget justifications in a report format every year. These reports contain.the President's budget requests for TPA distribution by, among other categories, tribe. As you are aware, the TPA program came into existence in the early 1990s. Interior has copied for you the relevant portions of the BIA's budget justifications from 1993 to the present, and I will mail these documents to you by December 21, 2006. If you should find after reviewing these documents that you would like to see the entire budget justifications, Interior can make the books available at its office. In addition, I note that these are publically available documents and can be found at the Library of Congress and may also be available at other libraries with government holdings. In your November 13,2006, letter, you stated that the Government cannot state that it can neither admit nor deny a request for admission based on a lack of information after a reasonable inquiry has been made, but must describe the inquiry made. In our view, the cases you have cited do

Case 1:02-cv-01383-MMS

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not, in fact, stand for that proposition. However, in the interest of trying to resolve our disputes, IHS will provide a more thorough description of its inquiry. We hope to provide this by December 29,2006. However, as I have mentioned to you previously, many federal employees are on leave at this time of year and, consequently, it is possible there may be some delay. I will keep you informed of any delay. IHS is also continuing to search for responsive documents and I am continuing to consult with the agency to determine if other information that may address some of Plaintiffs concerns is available. If anything hrther is found, I will provide it as soon as possible. I hope these responses, in combination with the information the agencies have already provided, will address your concerns so that we may continue to move forwazlrd with this case.

Sincerely,

cc

William R. Perry Craig J. Dorsay