Big Bets by Tribes and Foes

Proposition 5, the Indian gambling measure on California’s November ballot, will set a new standard for spending on a state initiative. The combined war chests of supporters and opponents might reach $30 million to $35 million, but Proposition 5 won’t be the last word on anything.

The contentious issue of wagering in casinos on Indian lands is national in scope. The major battlegrounds have been the courts, whose rulings so far have been inconsistent. Complaints by several governors about alleged vagaries in the Federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 also are at issue. The disputes are playing out in Congress, within the ranks of the National Gambling Impact Study Commission and in the case of Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the Interior, who faces questions about his role in an Indian casino decision.

Here in California, Proposition 5 supporters seek what Indian tribal authorities around the nation want: the right to run Las Vegas-style casinos with slot machines that allow the more lucrative payoffs involved in bets against the house, rather than mere betting against other players.

Gov. Pete Wilson has tried a precedent-setting end run around the issue by negotiating a no-Vegas-slots pact with an Indian tribe that wasn’t even involved in gambling. A judge ruled that the Legislature must approve the pact, and the issue remains in doubt.

Sympathizers with Indian casinos in California and elsewhere voice a compelling argument: The tribes have suffered through marginal existence, welfare dependency and extreme poverty for decades; gambling on their lands provides them improved living conditions, better schools, scholarships, health care and additional police officers.

But a large part of the nation has soured on the gambling boom. Many efforts to duplicate Las Vegas’ success in building economic development on gambling have failed. Communities found their own residents, not just outsiders, were laying down bets and losing more than they could afford.

The backlash has also hurt other forms of gambling, including state lotteries. Congress wants to crush gambling on the Internet. The Seminoles in Florida, the Salt River Indian casino in Arizona, Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot Indians and Rhode Island’s Narragansett tribe all face strident opposition to their gambling plans.

Meanwhile, the opposing sides in California are stretching the truth. The tribes claim their gambling revenues provide $120 million in tax income to all Californians. But in fact they don’t pay taxes on reservation profits. The tribes’ uppermost motivation, here and elsewhere, is sovereignty, solvency and self-sufficiency--in a word, money.

The Nevada casinos and hotels and other gambling enterprises opposed to Indian gambling claim that solid regulation and gambling’s good name are at stake. What hooey. Nevada’s real fear is that too many Californians will blow their stash at Indian casinos and have nothing left for Nevada, and California card clubs and racetracks are similarly afraid of losing their piece of the pie.

What’s needed is definitive case law, a clarification of federal statutes, and states and tribes that are willing to consider what is best for all sides. In other words, all of the options that won’t be present at California voting booths in November.