Chumash, County at Odds Over Casino Plan

This is a village of rustic charm set amid the vineyards and pastures of the Santa Ynez Valley. Just a few miles down Highway 246 are the Danish bakeries and windmills of Solvang. Up the road is Lake Cachuma and the forests and mountains that surround it.

Then there’s Chumash Casino. Once it was just a tiny place, but now its Indian owners are halfway through a major expansion -- something akin to turning a country store into a complex bigger than a Wal-Mart.

Anywhere else in this part of the state, such a large development -- hundreds of thousands of square feet of new construction dwarfing its surroundings -- would have been subject to stringent local studies of its effects.

But in this slice of Santa Barbara County, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians makes its reservation. The tribe has sovereign nation status: Local governments usually have no jurisdiction over its activities, including land use.

The steel girders of a new 200,000-square-foot casino now dominate the landscape. Just behind that is a new parking structure, with another being planned. There will also be a 105-room hotel and a showroom designed to lure major show business stars.

The complex is set just off the two-lane country highway. It already towers over the cluster of chic coffee shops and country stores in the community of 4,200 people just across the road.

Some of the 22,000 residents in the surrounding Santa Ynez Valley are angered and frustrated by the expansion.

And county officials complain that the tribe’s good-faith contributions to county expenses aren’t enough to offset the increased services that expansion will require.

After two years of battle between the tribe and the county, a showdown is nearing. The formal gambling agreement between the state and Indian tribes may be renegotiated in March. Gov. Gray Davis has signaled that he might be willing to trade further expansion of Indian gambling statewide for $1.5 billion or so in revenue to help close California’s budget deficit.

County officials and residents of the Santa Ynez Valley want their concerns to be a factor in any such negotiations.

If that bothers Chumash Tribal Chairman Vincent Armenta, he doesn’t show it. The Chumash actually have a “pretty good relationship” with the county, he said, and the tribe donates about $1 million a year to the community around it.

And, Armenta added, he remains open to any reasonable conversations about mitigation issues.

He never heard that any concerned citizens group was worrying when the Chumash reservation lacked decent roads or sewers or water, Armenta noted with a smile. It was just a small patch of hilly land that nobody could do much with. And a creek that flooded.

The tribe has won most of the hands in this particular game. And the Chumash have learned a big lesson since legal gambling started: The odds are with the house.

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Charles Jackson and Don Schick are co-chairmen of the Santa Ynez Valley Concerned Citizens. The group formed in 1997 after the Chumash bought a 6.8-acre parcel on the Santa Ynez side of the road, across from the tribe’s existing 127-acre reservation.

The idea that the tribe might use its wealth to buy up land around it for additional commercial development is their primary concern, Jackson and Schick say. They seem resigned to casino expansion on the reservation.

“We aren’t ready to throw the towel in,” Schick said. “We can’t stop the expansion on the reservation. They are taking ultimate advantage of their sovereignty. Our real mission now is to lobby that they cannot annex additional property. We want it stopped.”

Jackson and Schick accuse tribal officials of failing to deal in good faith with local residents on such concerns as increased traffic and public safety. And they say the Chumash have not been completely open in disclosing development plans.

“We have been good neighbors,” Jackson said. “We tried to go through the front door and talk to them about developing something the area can accommodate. But they have no interest in that. We’d like to see them be a part of the community -- not be an island.”

Schick said he has decided to move away from the Santa Ynez Valley because of the casino expansion and tribal policies. He said he plans to relocate in Northern California.

“What bothers me is greed,” said the 68-year-old retired IBM employee. “All they do is line their own pockets.” Armenta, he said, “told me face to face that his goal is to own the whole town of Santa Ynez.”

In addition to the Concerned Citizens group, County Supervisor Gail Marshall, who represents the area, has been one of the primary critics of the Chumash expansion.

Marshall has been a leading efforts to persuade the tribe to pay local governments more to mitigate government expenses tied to casino expansion.

On the basis of an estimate that the casino will provide 221 new jobs, the county projects $7.5 million in increased costs, ranging from recreational facilities and school classrooms to traffic improvements.

“We did an analysis we would do on any other project in the county, applying the usual mitigation standards,” said John Buttny, executive staff assistant to Marshall. “We were thinking in terms of redoing the whole area around the casino. Their solution is to put up a stoplight,” Buttny said.

The county is hoping for sympathy from the state when the gambling compact is renegotiated. “The compacts are extremely weak in leaving it up to the tribe to make a so-called good-faith effort to deal with local concerns,” Buttny said. “In reality, that doesn’t require the tribe to do much.”

Santa Ynez Valley voters have supported Indian gambling in the past, but Buttny said that attitudes have changed as the casino complex has grown. “I think that’s too bad for everybody,” he said.

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Armenta said he is aware of community concerns. But “we felt from the beginning that a lot of the county’s requests were not warranted,” he said. “We made it clear from the beginning that we would carry our own load on this, and we are doing that.”

As an example, Armenta said, the tribe recently reached an agreement with the county fire department that it will fund a full-time firefighter for five years in connection with increased public safety risks. The tribe also has donated a search-and-rescue vehicle to the county.

The county concluded that the new employees who would work at the expanded casino would require $4.5 million in affordable housing construction and $340,000 in new school development. Those are the sorts of estimates that particularly irk Armenta.

“We’re not creating an extra population,” he said. “What we are doing is helping the local economy. Ninety-eight percent of the 800 employees we have now are from the county. We don’t need to build hundreds of new houses for them. They already live here.

“And we have given huge amounts of money to the schools here,” he said. “Everybody knows the local school has our support when they need it. I grew up here.”

Glenn Feldman, a Phoenix attorney who represents several tribes on gambling issues, said the subject of sovereignty is a muddy one for lawyers and judges.

“It’s like trying to explain the meaning of life,” Feldman said. “As a general rule, you can say that tribes are subject to federal law and not subject to state law. But that’s only a general rule.”

Feldman said he has seen no legal precedent, for example, establishing whether state officials can ban construction projects on Indian reservations except when both parties agree. On the other hand, he said, a murder on an Indian reservation in California would be handled by state and local officials. The governor made it clear that cooperation with local communities will be an issue in renegotiation of the compact. Armenta made it clear that any attempt to increase tribes’ payments to local public agencies will be met with a hard bargaining stance.

He scoffed at one estimate by Buttny that the Chumash already reap an average of $1 million a day from their 2,000 slot machines and other gambling activities.

“We don’t discuss those kinds of figures,” Armenta said. But I will say we don’t have that kind of volume. They probably got that number from the same place they came up with all those other numbers in that 2-second study they gave to us.”

As for his alleged comment about hoping one day to buy all of Santa Ynez, Armenta said: “I don’t remember saying that.... I never thought about it.”