Indian Gambling Looks Beyond the Reservations

Three years after California voters legalized Indian gambling, the $5-billion industry is attempting to move in a controversial new direction: off the reservation and into lucrative urban markets.

The state’s Indian casinos are currently confined to reservations, but at least 26 tribes are seeking to take advantage of provisions in state and federal law that would allow them to establish casinos beyond reservation boundaries.

Even tribes without reservations theoretically could establish casinos. A faction of the landless Gabrielino-Tongva tribe wants to build the first Indian casino resort in Los Angeles County. The landless Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria announced plans last week to build one near Rohnert Park, 40 miles north of San Francisco.

The Tule River Indian Tribe of Porterville is developing plans for a casino and hotel along Highway 190, about 13 miles off the reservation. The Ewiiaapaayp tribe in eastern San Diego County, just eight members strong, has plans to build a casino 40 miles away in the community of Alpine.

And the Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley hope to build a big casino in Hesperia. That’s more than 100 miles from their reservation.

Realizing those casino dreams won’t be easy. A full-scale off-reservation casino would require approvals from local governments, the governor of California and the secretary of the Interior.

Before all that could take place, however, a tribe would have to take the land in question into trust as sovereign Indian territory, a complicated federal process that can take a decade.

No Native American group in California has yet done this.

In any case, “when California voters approved Propositions 5 and 1A to allow Indian gaming, they did so with the understanding that new casinos would be built on reservation lands, not in incorporated cities,” said Gov. Gray Davis’ spokeswoman, Amber Pashricha.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, pointed out this summer that off-reservation casinos “present problems for local governments, because the local government has absolutely no control over zoning, police, fire, roads or other local ordinances.”

But with budget-squeezed cities looking for recession-proof income, gambling promoters figure it’s a good time to go “reservation shopping.”

Off-reservation casinos are seen as the next phase in the evolution of an industry that began less than two decades ago as a handful of bingo parlors. Today, on reservations across the state, there are 54 Las Vegas-style gambling palaces with hotels, golf courses, first-class restaurants and gaming rooms featuring cascading waterfalls and bikini-clad coin changers.

The number of people employed by California tribes grew by about 18% for the 12 months ending in July, far surpassing all other private or public sectors in the state, California Employment Development Department figures show. Roughly 90% of the 40,300 workers employed by tribes are non-Indians.

For Indians themselves, casinos represent self-reliance.

Some Indian casinos generate an estimated $185 million a year from slot machines alone.

Facing success stories like that, investors are encouraging tribes that had been left stranded on remote and desolate reservations, or without a land base, to seek a piece of the action any way -- and any place -- they can.

Sipping a frosty soda pop at a roadside grill in his hometown, Hesperia Mayor Dennis Nowicki counted his blessings now that the Timbisha Shoshone have come to town with a proposal to build a casino resort on 57 acres that he said is home for “a whole bunch of jack rabbits.”

Today, the Hesperia City Council is expected to vote on whether to enter into a municipal services agreement with the tribe to build the casino near Main Street and Interstate 15.

“This casino will create a thousand new jobs and $137 million for the city over the next 20 years,” Nowicki said. “And this tribe wants to give us $2 million for a new fire station and $800,000 more for a fire truck.”

Timbisha Shoshone spokesman Kevin Gover, former head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, agreed that “it’s a great site and a great city.”

“There would be practically zero chance of this project getting off the ground without the participation and approval of the local community,” Gover said. “The secretary of Interior will take that into account.”

That kind of talk worries Hanay Geiogamah, director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.

“I’m concerned the whole casino issue is threatening to get completely out of control within the Native American community,” he said

“In particular, I’m concerned about tribes’ trying to make new reservations out of parcels that were never part of their ancestral lands,” he said. “I think that’s a risky strategy, one that could trigger a backlash in courts and in Congress, once the scope of the off-reservation movement becomes clear in people’s minds.”

“Small tribes are being seduced into believing casinos are easy tickets to eternal riches,” he added. “That is not the case.”

In the meantime, two factions of the landless Gabrielino-Tongva tribe, which is not federally recognized, are locked in a bare-knuckles Los Angeles County Superior Court battle over plans to build a large-scale casino resort in the metropolitan area. Casino sites said to be under consideration include a downtown parcel and a polluted former dump in Monterey Park.

Essentially, one tribal group that wants a casino is suing another to gain control of historical documents and other resources that could help it gain federal recognition, a requirement for taking land into trust. The group being sued claims it has no interest in gaming or in handing over any of its information.

The attorney for the group backing the casino, Jonathan Stein, declined to comment.

Anthony Morales, a spokesman for the group being sued, said, “Their lawsuit is frivolous. But it is also frustrating.”

Morales’ lawyer, Jack Schwartz, adjunct professor of law at Loyola Marymount University, said Stein recently offered to drop the lawsuit if Schwartz’s client would agree to turn over documents -- compiled over two decades with help from UCLA scholars -- proving the tribe’s ancestral ties to the region.

Standing in a courthouse hall and clutching a small leather “medicine pouch” given to him by one his clients, Schwartz shook his head in dismay and said, “Basically, they’ve filed a lawsuit to steal our identity and take over the tribe. At stake is a casino that could be among the wealthiest in the nation. We’re not interested, and they’re trying to bankrupt us because of that.”

In Barstow, a high desert pit stop between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the chatter at City Hall is about all the new housing, restaurants and light industry that would be stimulated by a casino resort proposed by the 280-member tribe, whose reservation is 162 miles away in San Diego.

In an interview in his office, Barstow Mayor Lawrence Dale and redevelopment agency head Ron Rector could hardly contain their excitement at having signed an “exclusive bargaining agreement” with the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla and Cupeno Indians and its Detroit-based investor group, Barwest LLC.

Leaning forward in his chair, Dale smiled and said, “We could break ground as early as next year.”

“I’m already getting calls from other businesses wanting to come to town; and we’ll have new housing starts, which we haven’t seen in years,” Rector said.

Not if Barstow’s church leaders can help it. After all, City Council members signed campaign promises saying they would never allow legalized gambling in town.

That was before Los Coyotes, along with investors led by owners of the Little Caesar’s pizza chain, the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers pitched the plan that they said would bring nearly 2,000 jobs and millions of dollars to town.

The proposal, which came to light in June, has torn apart the tight-budgeted community of 22,000 people.

Supporters see it as a boon in one of the few cities in the state with a shrinking population. Opponents call it a scheme that would drain the local water table, create traffic congestion and increase crime.

A Lake Havasu tribe has entered the fray, saying it deserves the exclusive right to a casino in Barstow because it has ancestral ties to the region.

The chaotic dispute recently moved the newly formed Barstow Christian Ministerial Assn. to dispatch an emissary to Washington, D.C.

Pastor Charles Mattix of the Barstow First Assembly of God Church, which draws 140 people on a good Sunday, recalled racing from one meeting to another with people who have the power to make or break the casino project. Among them were Feinstein, the chairman of the National Indian Gaming Commission and a counsel to Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton.

Mattix handed each of them a thick packet containing the city’s negotiating agreement, news articles about the proposal, background information on Barstow, 47 pastoral signatures and copies of the City Council members’ campaign promises.

“It’s all about trust,” Mattix explained. “We stood before our congregations with those statements in hand prior to the election.

“People went to the polls with that information and cast their ballots in trust and good faith,” Mattix said.

“I can’t speak for the City Council,” responded Barstow City Manager Vijay Singhal. “But this isn’t just a casino. It’s a massive development that will be a catalyst for growth in a place where businesses are closing and the youth are leaving because there are no jobs.”