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Construction and Transportation Our firm is a leader in the growing fields of Indian self-determination/self-governance construction law and tribal transportation law. For many years, we have provided a wide variety of legal services to tribal clients as they have successfully developed major construction projects within their reservations, territories, villages and communities. These projects have ranged from multimillion dollar rural water projects to health clinics to roads. Such construction projects have brought jobs, improved infrastructure and better government services to tribal communities and have helped tribal economies grow and prosper. Our firm has helped negotiate innovative self-determination contracts, self-governance compacts, tribal-state-federal cooperative agreements and subcontracts that provide greater financial benefits and legal protections for our tribal clients, while at the same time ensuring greater accountability to our tribal clients from the federal agencies and construction contractors involved in these projects. As with all our work of behalf of Indian tribes, our goal is to help build strong economies, enhance sovereignty and improve government capacity for our clients as we help to break new legal ground in this emerging field of Indian law.
To ensure that Congress provides adequate funding for tribal construction projects and transportation programs, we also regularly engage in legislative and lobbying activities on behalf of our clients. Most recently, our firm has played a leading role in the current legislative effort to seek increased Indian Reservation Roads (IRR) Program funding and to establish-for the first time-tribal transit and traffic safety programs in the new highway reauthorization legislation (so-called TEA-21 reauthorization). In this regard, we have assisted tribal leaders and tribal organizations around the country in developing and uniting behind a uniform package of tribal transportation legislative proposals. While the bill has yet to become law, we are pleased to report that many of our clients' principal legislative proposals have been adopted in the Senate highway reauthorization bill (S. 1072) that recently passed by a large margin. Attorneys in our firm have also served as legal consultants on every negotiated rulemaking committee established to implement the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act and other tribal programs, including, most recently, the IRR Program Negotiated Rulemaking Committee and the Title V Self-Governance Negotiated Rulemaking Committee. Our work on these issues is limited in only one respect-we work exclusively to advance the interests of Indian tribes and tribal organizations.
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