Dispute over Cherokee pay raises headed for court
A group of Cherokee people angry over Tribal Council’s decision last fall to give itself a 15 percent pay raise and back pay is planning to file a lawsuit against its members this month.
In April, an attorney for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians for Justice & Accountability sent a demand letter to each of the 12 councilmembers and to Interim Attorney General Hannah Smith, declaring that if council did not rescind the legislation creating the raises and return the money at its May meeting, they would press charges.
The May 11 meeting came and went with nothing on the agenda pertaining to the group’s demand, but that doesn’t mean that Tribal Council is ignoring the situation. They’ve hired a Washington, D.C. attorney, Shenan Rae Attcity, to represent them in the case that has yet to be filed.
“Shenan had offered for my clients to sit down and talk with Tribal Council,” said Meghann Burke, attorney for EBCI for Justice and Accountability, but Burke said she’d made it clear that there would be no point to any meeting that was not a discussion about how to rescind the resolution.
“We’re not really interested in any other kind of conversation,” Burke said.
Council passed the resolution creating the raises in an October budget meeting by a vote of 9-1, with Councilmember Bo Crowe, of Wolftown, opposed and councilmembers Teresa McCoy, of Big Cove, and Brandon Jones, of Snowbird, absent from the meeting.
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There wasn’t any discussion at the meeting, but when word got out that council had voted itself a pay raise of $10,600 — boosting the pay of a councilmember in a non-chair position from $70,000 to $80,600 — public opinion blew up.
At the November meeting, McCoy and Birdtown representative Albert Rose, who had originally voted for the legislation, introduced protests against it, which were shot down. Tribal members said their piece at the podium, alleging that the raises were in violation of a section of the tribe’s Charter and Governing Document, which states that any pay raises council votes itself must wait until after the next election to go into effect. They also decried the fat back pay checks councilmembers got for the years when they supposedly should have already been receiving the additional pay. Some were worth more than $30,000.
Meanwhile, Chief Michell Hicks — who, though the resolution did not bump his salary, did receive a $42,500 back-pay check — defended the raises as a compliance with a 2004 resolution, which says that councilmembers’ raises should be in keeping with those given to tribal employees. The pay increase was not a raise, Hicks said, but an adjustment for the years when council did not receive raises in keeping with the rate given tribal employees.
But anger continued to simmer on the reservation, leading to the creation of the EBCI for Justice & Accountability and the beginning of legal action against the tribal government.
Attcity has already said that her clients will file a motion to dismiss, Burke said, on the grounds of sovereign immunity — a legal doctrine stating that government is immune from legal action unless it consents to it.
“We contend that if you act illegally, you cannot possibly be acting under the power of the law,” Burke said.
The complaint, once filed, will look different from the draft, Burke said, likely including additional defendants or claims. In the draft, the nine Tribal Council members who voted for the raises are named individually, and Tribal Council is also named as a whole.
The case will be filed in Cherokee Tribal Court.
“We have confidence in Tribal Court to adjudicate these claims,” Burke said. “The claim is purely intra-tribal, and we think the Tribal Court is the appropriate place for intra-tribal disputes to be resolved.”
Attcity was traveling this week and was not available for interview by press time.
