Chairman Seki, Treasurer Johnson and others met with Representative Nolan, Representative Peterson, Senator Franken and Senator Klobuchar to discuss issues that have an impact for Red Lake. Chief among these issues included the lack of jurisdiction to prosecute non-members and our fight against moving BIA funding to a grant based system rather than the current single year funding (for money beyond our annual amount known as base funding). Chairman Seki and Treasurer Johnson also met with Secretary Washburn of BIA to state Red Lake's opposition to the move to the grant based system.

Other issues our leaders discussed included the tribal roads funding issue. Under current calculation formulas Red Lake has lost 30 million in road construction while one tribe, with less than a 1/4th of our land base received enough to build travel trailer parks for their casinos. Another tribe, the Ho Chunk nation vigorously opposes such a change and today announced their arrival in BIA regional office in Bloomington, Minnesota, to fight against the "Assault on their road funding".