Opinion ID: 3152784
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Act Preempts H.B. 2534

Text: Despite the presumption against preemption, the district court properly concluded that H.B. 2534 is preempted by the Act. “What is a sufficient obstacle is a matter of judgment, to be informed by examining the federal statute as a whole and identifying its purpose and intended effects . . . .” Crosby, 530 U.S. at 373. As required by Crosby then, we proceed to examine the “purpose and intended effects” of the Act. The Act was passed in recognition of the federal government’s trust responsibility to the Nation and to compensate it for the destruction of tribal land by flooding. The Act recognized that “[t]he lack of an appropriate land base severely retards the economic self-sufficiency of the O’odham people of the Gila Bend Indian Reservation, contributes to their high unemployment and acute health problems, and result in chronic high costs for Federal services and transfer payments.” Pub. L. No. 99-503, § 2(3). As 508 F.3d 1189 (9th Cir. 2007), we distinguished Locke by limiting its holding to cases of field preemption, where “Congress leaves no room for state regulation.” Id. at 1194–95. TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION V. STATE OF ARIZONA 15 eponymously expressed by the “Gila Bend Indian Reservation Lands Replacement Act,” the Act was meant to “facilitate replacement of reservation lands with lands suitable for sustained economic use which is not principally farming and do not require Federal outlays for construction, and promote the economic self-sufficiency of the O’odham Indian people.” Id. § 2(4). Under the Act, replacement land is to be obtained by enabling the Nation to purchase private land that, under certain conditions, the Secretary is to hold in trust for the Nation. Pub. L. No. 99-503, § 6(c)-(d). The Act describes the mechanism and requirements by which the federal government is to take purchased land into trust and thereby incorporate the land into tribal land: The Secretary, at the request of the Tribe, shall hold in trust for the benefit of the Tribe any land which the Tribe acquires pursuant to subsection (c) which meets the requirements of this subsection. Any land which the Secretary holds in trust shall be deemed to be a Federal Indian Reservation for all purposes. Land does not meet the requirements of this subsection if it is outside the counties of Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima, Arizona, or within the corporate limits of any city or town. Land meets the requirements of this subsection only if it constitutes not more than three separate areas consisting of contiguous tracts, at least one of which areas shall be contiguous to San Lucy Village. The Secretary may waive the requirements set forth in the preceding 16 TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION V. STATE OF ARIZONA sentence if he determines that additional areas are appropriate. Id. § 6(d). Parsing this provision, several conditions must be satisfied before purchased land can be taken into trust by the Secretary. First, the phrase “at the request of the Tribe” indicates that the Nation must request that the Secretary take purchased land into trust. Second, the section imposes two limitations: (a) the purchased land cannot be “outside the counties of Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima” in Arizona, and (b) the purchased land cannot be “within the corporate limits of any city or town.” Third, the purchased land must “constitute[] not more than three separate areas consisting of contiguous tracts, at least one of which areas shall be contiguous to San Lucy Village.” Once these requirements are satisfied, the provision commands that the Secretary “shall” take the land into trust, and any such land “shall” be deemed to be tribal land. Thus, the Secretary’s taking of eligible land is mandatory, not permissive. Here, it is undisputed that the Nation purchased the 54 acres of land constituting Parcel 2 and, on January 28, 2009, filed a trust application with the Secretary. It is also undisputed that the Secretary issued a decision on July 23, 2010, concluding that Parcel 2 was not “within the corporate limits of any city or town,” and that, having satisfied all the legal requirements under the Gila Bend Act, acquisition of the land into trust was mandatory. Following our remand in Gila River Indian Community, 729 F.3d 1139 (9th Cir. 2013), the Secretary has since reconsidered and reconfirmed the jurisdictional interpretation of the phrase “within the corporate limits.” But for the stay imposed by the district court in Gila River Indian Community pending appeal of that TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION V. STATE OF ARIZONA 17 case, Parcel 2 could have been taken into trust after September 25, 2010. H.B. 2534 was passed two years after the Secretary’s decision was handed down. H.B. 2534 clearly stands as an obstacle to the implementation of the Act because, “under the circumstances of [this] particular case,” the effect of the state law is to thwart “the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives” of the Act—namely, to enable the Secretary to take Parcel 2 (and the remainder of the Replacement Lands) into trust and thereby incorporate the land into tribal land. Crosby, 530 U.S. at 373 (quotation marks omitted). Specifically, H.B. 2534 provides that “[a] city or town located in a county with a population of more than three hundred fifty thousand persons may annex any territory within an area that is surrounded by the city or town or that is bordered by the city or town on at least three sides if the landowner has submitted a request to the federal government to take ownership of the territory or hold the territory in trust.” A.R.S. § 9-471.04. This provision applies to the Replacement Lands because they are located within Maricopa County, which exceeds the population threshold of 350,000 people,2 and are fully “surrounded” by lands incorporated by the City. Moreover, H.B. 2534 authorizes the annexation of adjacent lands—i.e., the placing of land within [the City’s] corporate limits—upon the landowner’s [the Nation’s] request that the land be taken into trust. This language in H.B. 2534 was triggered when the Nation requested that the Secretary take land purchased by the 2 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the estimated population of Maricopa County in 2011 was over 3 million. See U.S. Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/04013.html (last visited Oct. 16, 2015). 18 TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION V. STATE OF ARIZONA Nation [Parcel 2] into trust. Pub. L. No. 99-503, § 6(d). H.B. 2534 further specifies that “‘submitted a request to the federal government’ means the landowner has made an application to the federal government as required by a specific federal statute or regulation.” The Act is such a “specific federal statute.” Accordingly, at the very moment the Nation files an application with the Secretary to take any of the Replacement Lands into trust, the City is permitted, pursuant to H.B. 2534, to annex the same land by either a majority vote of the governing body or by two-thirds vote of the governing body, in which case the annexation “becomes immediately operative.” A.R.S § 9-471.04, § A.2. It is abundantly clear that H.B. 2534 applies to the Nation’s trust application to the Secretary, filed in January 2009, and would, if not preempted, enable the City to effectively veto any portion of that application not already brought to fruition. This is so because once the land is annexed, it would no longer be outside “the corporate limits” and therefore would be ineligible to be taken into trust. In this case, the Secretary has already determined that Parcel 2 fulfills the statutory requirements of the Act and must be taken into trust, and took Parcel 2 into trust once the district court’s injunction in Gila River Indian Community was dissolved. The trust application for the remainder of the Replacement Lands has been held in abeyance, but if the Nation renews its application, the Secretary has an obligation to take it into trust, since it also satisfies the requirements under Section 6(d) of the Act. Unless preempted, H.B. 2534 would permit the City to bar the taking of any of the remaining Replacement Lands into trust by the federal government, thereby blocking the Nation’s effort to find replacement land, all in direct contravention of the express purpose of the Act. TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION V. STATE OF ARIZONA 19 Defendants challenge the district court’s preemption analysis primarily on the ground that the district court erroneously read a temporal freezing provision into Section 6(d) of the Act. The district court interpreted the phrase “at the request of the Tribe” to mean that “when the Nation asks [the agency] to take land into trust that is not at that time within the corporate limits of any city or town, [the agency] has a mandatory obligation to take the land into trust provided the other requirements . . . are satisfied” (emphasis added). Section 6(d) does not specify a precise time at which the Secretary assesses whether the purchased land is or is not within corporate limits. The point in time could be at the time of purchase, at the time the trust application is filed, or anytime after the application is filed but before a decision by the Secretary is issued. However, we need not decide this issue, since it does not affect our preemption analysis. Under H.B. 2534, the City purportedly has the authority—at the point when the Nation files a trust application—to preemptively annex unincorporated land and effectively block the trust application. This directly bars the Nation’s effort to incorporate purchased land into tribal land, regardless of the moment in time at which the Secretary decides whether the land is within corporate limits. Under the circumstances of this case, H.B. 2534 stands as a clear and manifest obstacle to the purpose of the Act because it was enacted after the Nation’s trust application was filed, and it uses that application itself to thwart the taking of purchased land into trust. Accordingly, we hold that H.B. 2534 is preempted by the Act. 20 TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION V. STATE OF ARIZONA