Tribe Risks Rejection, Pushes Plan for Casino Near Capital

Out where the rumbling interstate carves the edge of town, a horseshoe-shaped vacant lot has become the latest proving ground for California’s venture into high-stakes gambling.

The Upper Lake Pomo tribe hopes to build a $200-million casino and hotel on a 67-acre plot it has optioned to buy, just up the highway from a couple of billboards hawking Nevada gaming palaces.

If it succeeds, the largely impoverished tribe of 150 would be swimming in wealth. It would also accomplish something few tribes have before, setting down gambling roots in an untapped urban market far from its home on the languid shores of Clear Lake, 80 miles northwest as the eagle flies.

Foes worry that it could set a dangerous precedent, kicking off a land rush of tribal casinos -- long relegated to California’s rural outskirts -- into the state’s metropolitan core. With more than 50 California tribes still seeking federal recognition and many more still hunting for a land base, the state could face ballooning pressure.

The Pomo tribe’s casino, planned as a virtual replica of the golden statehouse dome just across the Sacramento River, has drawn opposition from U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Gov. Gray Davis. They worry that voters who supported Native American gaming on the 2000 statewide ballot didn’t envision high-stakes gambling invading California’s largest cities.

“They’re trying to deal us right out of the game,” said David Rosenberg, the governor’s senior advisor for intergovernmental affairs. “If they can build in West Sacramento, what’s to stop some other tribe from saying they want to do gaming in downtown Los Angeles or in the middle of Hollywood or in the heart of San Francisco?”

Those are misleading words, said Carmella Icay-Johnson, the soft-spoken tribal leader of the Upper Lake Pomo. Blustery foes are making her tribe out to be a boogeyman, she said, arguing that the Pomo’s plans for a casino on the urban edge won’t set a precedent. Instead, it is their one-shot opportunity to wrest free of their dreary lives in rural Lake County.

Backing the Pomo is a troika of Sarasota, Fla., businessmen who stand to gain 30% of the proceeds for financing, building and running the casino.

The promoter is Roy Palmer. An erstwhile Chicago attorney and inveterate character, Palmer is white-haired, favors a walrus mustache and wears bow ties and loud sports coats. Native American gambling has been very, very good to him.

In the 1990s, he formed Buffalo Brothers Management Inc. to help the St. Croix Chippewa of Wisconsin develop two casinos. The corporation’s fee was huge: 40% to run the casino, an additional 30% off slot machines they leased the tribe. Disgruntled tribal members sued, saying they were being taken. In 1994, the St. Croix bought Palmer out for a reported $30 million.

Palmer, ever buoyant, says the dispute was overblown, cooked up by a rival casino outfit. At 67, Palmer says, he has now stepped out of Florida retirement -- “I was playing tennis seven days a week, reading books, taking naps” -- mostly out of a desire to help the Upper Lake Pomo.

The proceeds reaped by Palmer and his partners -- fellow Florida retirees Robert Roskamp and Philip Kaltenbacher, former chairman of New Jersey’s Republican Party -- will go toward philanthropy, Palmer said. If the tribe succeeds, it would have a lucrative market of 1.5 million residents in the Sacramento region at the doorstep of its casino, right beside busy Interstate 80. The highway links the Bay Area -- and millions more potential customers -- with the Lake Tahoe-Reno area, which has already seen its casino business plummet as California’s tribal gambling receipts have soared to $5 billion a year.

“I think everyone fighting us is fighting out of fear,” Icay-Johnson said. “But we feel we’ve been wronged over the years, and this could help fulfill our dreams.”

Like so many tribes in the West, the Pomo tell a story of centuries of suffering. Their people endured the Spanish, then the Russian foray into Northern California, the brutality of the Gold Rush and the arrival of modern civilization.

Finally, in 1907, the federal government established a small ranch on Clear Lake’s north shore for the cluster of homeless Native Americans who made up the tribe. Fifty years later, the U.S. reversed course, promising the land to individual members if the tribe disbanded. Within years, much of that land was lost to unpaid taxes or sold off.

But in 1983, the Pomo joined about two dozen other Northern California tribes that regained federal recognition through the courts.

That old legal case is now at the heart of the tribe’s casino push. The Pomo are angling in federal court to reopen the old deal as a way to sidestep the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which largely restricts casino development to land a tribe held before the act’s passage. The act also requires that tribes get state permission if casino land is acquired after 1988; the Pomo hope to avoid that caveat as well, skirting an almost certain rejection by Davis.

Icay-Johnson says a Pomo casino on Sacramento’s edge would set no precedent for other tribes. Casino foes disagree, saying the case would blow open the doors to California cities.

To their dismay, the Upper Lake Pomo have for weeks engaged in settlement negotiations with Interior Department officials, who face a deadline today to say in court whether they will oppose the tribe’s efforts.

Meanwhile, the tribe’s three wealthy backers have mounted an aggressive lobbying push at Interior. During the first half of the year, they paid Washington lobbyists $160,000.

The tribe would appear to face an uphill fight. Interior Secretary Gale Norton last month said she was troubled by the increasing push by tribes to establish casinos in urban settings. She also rejected a Louisiana deal that would have allowed a tribe to build a casino 150 miles from its historic lands.

Even so, foes of the West Sacramento casino worry that the resolve of Interior officials could melt, said Mike McGowan, a supervisor in Yolo County, which includes West Sacramento. “If the federal government is not going to fight the tribe on this, then all the rest of us are helpless.”

California officials, meanwhile, are going to the mat.

Feinstein said in a Dec. 6 letter to Norton that a West Sacramento casino represents a dangerous precedent that would serve only to encourage other tribes and their financiers to seek sites “near major highways and urban areas.” She called it “a radical distortion of the will of California voters.”

West Sacramento, a town of 30,000 just across the river from California’s capital, is abuzz over the pitfalls and prospects of a lucrative casino. The City Council recently approved a deal that would eventually pour $14 million a year from the casino into municipal coffers to offset the costs of police, fire and other services. But earlier this month, a citizens group turned in a referendum petition in hopes of reversing the council deal.

Derek Bakus, a West Sacramento attorney, sees a lot to worry about -- traffic, vice, all the sorts of problems the little city has for years tried to fix.

He also fears the tribe would have a stranglehold on city politics. “We might as well make the city one big Indian reservation, because they could buy any election we have,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to see Roy Palmer as the next kingmaker of West Sacramento.”