Tribal Employment Rights Organization (TERO) is not a “welfare” program. It does not and should not do away with the competitive bidding process and fair competition.

It provides preference to bonafide and qualified Native American businesses. Preference is not provided to the exclusion of other businesses, and price and quality are still primary considerations.

Would you want your tribe or business to pay twice the amount of money for a construction project by eliminating the competitive bidding process and fair competition? Would tribal TERO vendors appreciate being shut out of the bidding process and fair competition for Oklahoma’s public and private sector jobs?

The commonsense answer to both of these questions is no.

Surely Bill John Baker, Jodie Fishinghawk and a few other council members who voted to eliminate a fair competitive bid process for a new construction project would not like to see the tribe pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential additional costs and at the same time generate a lot of ill will between a lot of good people.

Added costs would come out of one or more of a 100 different tribal programs that daily serve Cherokee citizens who truly have legitimate needs such as our elders, our sick and infirm, our young families and our children’s educational needs, among several others.

I appreciate those Cherokee Nation tribal council members who continue to look down the road and understand exactly how their decisions will affect the nation and our people in the future, let alone in present time.

Killing the Golden Goose that has provided Cherokee citizens thousands of new jobs, services, health care, educational opportunities, housing and hundreds of new community services is not the way to go. Let us all respect the dignity of Cherokee people by providing a “hand up” and an opportunity for long-term, self-sufficiency versus a “handout” that historically has kept our people continuously dependent on others.

C. Russo

Roland