Chumash expansion plans upset Solvang neighbors

Stretching beside the road to San Marcos Pass, the property known as Camp 4 is rolling, oak-studded and vast.

On that much, the land’s owners, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, and their neighbors in the Santa Ynez Valley agree.

But now that the tribe is pushing to annex the 1,400 bucolic acres it purchased last year, both sides are as ready to slug it out as the boxers who occasionally do battle in the Chumash Casino’s Samala Showroom. If Camp 4 is made part of the reservation, it won’t be subject to local land-use rules — a sore point in a county where almost every large development triggers intense scrutiny and epic public debate.

Opened in 2003, the casino has been a huge success. Once impoverished, the tribe is the valley’s biggest employer. With their newfound wealth, the Chumash have built a clinic, paid college and grad school expenses for their young people and given $15 million to local charities, but many of their neighbors are asking just how much more success the valley can stand.

At a recent meeting of more than 500 angry residents in Solvang, an attorney for community groups protesting the reservation’s expansion likened the crowd to the gritty freedom fighters of the Arab Spring.

“When I looked out today over the audience, I thought about Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Yemen,” said John Mark Rochefort, who has been fighting the Chumash in court for five years. “I thought about people we see every night on the news who are laying down their lives … to do exactly what you all have assembled here to do: to have a voice in your political destiny, to have a voice in your government.”

The audience burst into applause.

Dotted with Danish bakeries, Solvang flows more with butter than with blood, but the attorney’s point struck home: Only an outraged public could keep the Chumash from expanding their reservation by 1000% and, unfettered by county or state regulation, build a second casino, a massive hotel, a golf course or whatever else might turn a profit.

Chumash leaders say they have no desire to build anything but houses for the tribe’s 140 members on a piece of ancestral homeland. Rumors of rampant development plans have been fueled by a hostile local press and a small group of critics engaged in “a cannibalistic frenzy of myopic reactionism,” according to Chumash ally Carl Artman, a former assistant secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs.

In an interview, tribal chairman Vincent Armenta was unequivocal.

“Building a casino? We absolutely will not do it,” he said. “And to build a second casino two miles from the one we have: Sheer economics would tell you that’s not an intelligent move.”

Besides, he said, federal law — which sets out a difficult path for adding to reservations — also makes it virtually impossible to build a casino on reservation land acquired after 1988.

The reservation sits beside a creek in the shadow of the 280,000-square-foot Chumash casino. Some families are sharing houses “just so they can be part of our tribal community,” Armenta said.

Two miles away, Camp 4 sits at the junction of two of the valley’s most traveled roads, California highways 154 and 246. It’s a spot that meant something to the tribe centuries ago, Armenta said, as it will centuries from now. A plaque affixed to a boulder there makes the point indelibly: “Let this land link our past to our future.”

But the critics aren’t swayed.

Once the land becomes part of the reservation, they contend, all bets are off. Any promises the tribe makes beforehand would be “essentially unenforceable,” according to Rochefort.

At a rare public meeting held by the Chumash, tribal leaders and a panel they assembled tried to ease the community’s fears. They said development on reservations is governed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies. They said federal regulations, plus the tribe’s own oversight, can be more demanding than California’s, an assertion disputed by county officials and local activists.

“We’re all just running around to stop their latest tactics to get more land and power,” said Kathy Cleary, president of a group called Preservation of Los Olivos.

It and other groups objected to proposed state laws that would have benefited the tribe and, the groups claim, hurt the surrounding communities. They hit the ceiling when the state — without their knowledge — named California 154, a major valley road, the Chumash Highway.

Bitterness over Camp 4 goes back to 2004, when the tribe teamed up with Fess Parker, a former TV actor who shot to fame in the 1950s on the TV show “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter.” A savvy developer, Parker envisioned Camp 4’s fields and vineyards as a resort, two golf courses and hundreds of luxury homes, a project that the county probably would have rejected but that might have been possible on the reservation.

Opposed by celebrity residents including singer David Crosby, who testified against it before a congressional committee, the deal collapsed.

Weeks before Parker died in 2010, the Chumash bought Camp 4 for a reported $40 million, deepening local suspicion that the tribe had something more profitable in mind than homes for its families. And why, residents wondered, did they need to make the land part of the reservation rather than seek county approval like any other developer?

“We’re not a developer,” Armenta said. “We’re a sovereign government. Whether they understand it, whether they want to see it — that’s a fact.”

Expanding a reservation usually means getting the federal government to take land into trust on behalf of a tribe. But the “fee to trust” process is long, cumbersome and often detested by nearby communities, which see property slipping from the tax rolls and local control. When the Chumash wanted to annex 6.9 acres for a cultural center and park several years ago, community groups blocked the effort in a long court battle that cost them more than $2 million in legal fees.

Tribes also can expand through an act of Congress. Last December, Chumash leaders approached Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who said he would consider a bill only if the tribe had support from elected officials in Solvang and Santa Barbara County.

“This is a local issue,” said Gallegly spokesman Tom Pfeifer, “and that hasn’t changed.”

Jim Richardson, Solvang’s mayor, said he knows how he would vote. Although he tipped his hat to the tribe for acquiring the town’s tired Royal Scandinavian hotel and turning it into the elegant Hotel Corque, he said an expanded reservation could turn the area into “another Atlantic City.”

“I’m old school,” said the mayor, whose town is only a little bigger than the Camp 4 property. “I believe the U.S. is one nation and we don’t need any sovereign nations within it.”

Santa Barbara County Supervisor Doreen Farr is also a doubter. She said she questions the prosperous tribe’s economic need for additional reservation land, a requirement under fee-to-trust rules.

The tribe hopes to win county support by promising to reimburse it for the property taxes it would lose if Camp 4 becomes reservation land. But Farr said additional revenue won’t outweigh the risks of development the county can’t control.

“This will have an impact in perpetuity that you can’t even measure,” she said. “It would forever change the valley.”

steve.chawkins@latimes.com