Casino news source: Sacbee - ttp://www.sacbee.com
Amador sues U.S. to block casino
Supervisors: Tribe should not have gotten Plymouth-area site.
By Denny Walsh - Bee Staff Writer
Last Updated 12:11 am PDT Thursday, March 22, 2007
In an effort to keep another casino out of Amador County, the county is challenging the U.S. Department of Interior's acceptance of the Ione Band of Miwok Indians as a federally recognized tribe.
The department's September determination that 228 acres in and around the town of Plymouth qualify under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act as "Indian lands" on which the Miwoks may conduct gaming "constitutes an abuse of discretion and is arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law," Amador County alleges in a lawsuit filed Friday in Sacramento federal court.
The county claims that if a casino were built on the Plymouth acreage -- about 15 miles up Highway 49 from the Jackson Rancheria Casino, Hotel and Conference Center and operated by the Jackson Rancheria Band of Miwuk -- it would cause "massive environmental, traffic, public safety, law enforcement and social service problems for the residents of Amador County."
Amador is a rural county of 36,000 residents in the Sierra foothills southeast of Sacramento.
According to the suit, a gambling facility in Plymouth "is entirely inconsistent with the Amador County General Plan."
The action by the Interior Department would allow the 535-member Ione Band to build a $250 million hotel and casino complex in a town of 1,000 residents without requiring the tribe to consult with state and local officials about effects on the community.
The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act requires the Interior secretary and California's governor to conclude that proposed Nevada-style gambling would "not be detrimental" to the surrounding community, the county alleges in its suit.
The Interior Department ignored this protocol, however, invoking instead an exception in the act for so-called "restored tribes" -- tribes that at one time were not federally recognized and then later were recognized.
"Along with the county, the state of California's Office of the Governor has voiced opposition to the band's request," the suit says.
Andrea Lynn Hoch, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's legal affairs secretary, wrote in a May 1 letter to the National Indian Gaming Commission that the evidence submitted by the band does not justify the "restored tribes" exception applied by the Interior Department.
The suit asks U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton for an injunction barring the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs from continuing to process the band's request that the Interior Department acquire the Plymouth acreage in trust for the Miwoks.
If the land goes into trust for use as a casino, the county alleges, "the resulting harm to the county's interests and those of its citizens will be substantial and irreparable."
"We're trying to prevent the destruction of our rural communities by federal government actions that allow small Indian tribes with deep-pocket investors to build mega-casinos on farmland and open space," said Louis Boitano, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors. "In a small area with only 36,000 residents and an existing casino and at least two more casinos proposed, we feel we are simply under siege, and we've received little support from the Department of Interior."
The third project is a casino proposed near Ione by the Buena Vista Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians.
Interior Department spokeswoman Nedra Darling said the agency would not comment because the matter is the subject of a lawsuit.
The authority for BIA to proceed with the Ione Band's application to take the Plymouth land into trust is a Sept. 26 letter from Associate Deputy Secretary of the Interior James Cason to Matthew Franklin, the band's chairman.
Cason wrote that Carl Artman, associate solicitor of the department's Division of Indian Affairs, "has reviewed your request and determined that the lands that are the subject of your application will qualify as 'Indian lands' within the meaning of the IGRA, on which the tribe may conduct gaming."
"I concur in that determination," Cason wrote.
In a memorandum to Cason dated Sept. 19, Artman concluded the Plymouth property may be acquired in trust as part of "the restoration of lands for an Indian tribe that is restored to federal recognition."
Artman traced the convoluted history of the band and decreed that it was accepted in 1972 by the commissioner of Indian affairs as a recognized tribe, rejected 20 years later by the Interior Department as a recognized tribe, then reinstated as a recognized tribe by an assistant secretary of the department in 1994.
"Under the unique history of its relationship with the United States, the band should be considered a restored tribe within the meaning of IGRA," Artman wrote.
"The tribe must have a modern and historical connection to the land and there must be a reasonable temporal connection between the date the land is acquired and the date the tribe was restored," he noted.
"In this case," he wrote, "the evidence is that the land being acquired is in an area that is historically significant to the band. It is within a few miles of several historic tribal burial grounds and the site where some of the band's ancestors signed a treaty.
"Many of the band's members live in the surrounding area, and the band has used facilities in the city of Plymouth to hold governmental meetings in recent years, establishing a modern connection to the area."
Artman noted that, after the 1994 reinstatement, the band's members split into several factions, "which delayed the reorganization of a modern tribal government."
"The current proposed acquisition, coming only 12 years after restoration, is reasonably temporal under the circumstances," he decided.
"We're very hopeful the federal court will do the right thing and uphold the Department of Interior's decision," said Miwok Chairman Franklin. "We're very happy with that decision and feel strongly it is just."
But Amador County has a decidedly different view.
"The Ione Band has never established a historic tribal identity that would justify federal recognition," the county insists in its suit. |
|
World Casino Directory 
Gambling Forums 
