As the Kaiser Canyon fire continued to rage on the Colville Reservation on Thursday, burning nearly 86,000 acres by midday, a short video of a candidate running to represent the area in Congress drew outrage on social media.
In the clip from a 4th Congressional District candidate forum on Tuesday, Republican Jerrod Sessler tells the audience in Moses Lake that funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency give the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation an “incentive” to have “more fires, because we get free money.”
“What’s happening up in Colville right now, if you guys remember, a couple years ago, there was another fire up there, which they don’t pay taxes to support,” Sessler said at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center. “They don’t pay taxes for anything, but yet we fight those fires to the tune of millions of dollars, and they got a check from FEMA for $30 million for the fire.”
Cody Desautel, executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, called Sessler’s claims “complete nonsense.”
The false trope that tribes and tribal members pay no taxes is widespread enough that the Colville Tribes have a web page dedicated to debunking the claim with specific examples of taxes the tribal government and enrolled tribal members pay, such as sales tax, federal income tax and county property tax.
“Our land is not taxed through the county assessors, and that’s because technically it’s federal land owned by the U.S. government and held...
As the Kaiser Canyon fire continued to rage on the Colville Reservation on Thursday, burning nearly 86,000 acres by midday, a short video of a candidate running to represent the area in Congress dr...