Will Dejope bingo machines open door for casino?
By David Callender
When the newly renovated Ho-Chunk-owned Dejope bingo facility, just off the Beltline and the Interstate on Madison's east side, officially reopens Friday, it will have a decidedly Las Vegas vibe.
The cavernous bingo hall, with hundreds of players marking paper bingo cards with a lone caller at the front of the room, will be gone.
In its place will be a huge "gaming facility" full of nearly 1,000 blinking video machines that, at a casual glance, may look suspiciously like a casino.
"It's going to look like slot machines, but it's not," says Tracy Littlejohn, a spokeswoman for the Ho-Chunk.
But, she acknowledges, "There's definitely more of that casino feel."
Billboards that have appeared around Madison have hinted at those changes. Some depict a Vegas dancer's plumed headpiece on the city's skyline, while others show Madison's name on the famous Las Vegas "Welcome" sign.
The makeover comes a little more than two years after Dane County voters soundly rejected a referendum that would have opened the door for the Ho-Chunk to convert Dejope into a full-scale casino. Tribal gaming and the big money behind it has been a hot-button issue in state politics for years, and critics now charge that the Ho-Chunk transformation blurs the distinction between bingo and casino gambling and opens the door for off-reservation tribal gaming.
"It's a graying of the line," says Brian Nemoir, director of Enough!, a coalition of groups that oppose off-reservation gambling.
"The electorate of Dane County said 'no' convincingly to this two years ago," Nemoir says. "Now you've got a governor and a tribe that says 'We don't care what you think, we're going to go ahead and do what we want to do.' "
Local officials have been watching the renovation plans with concern.
Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, who supported the 2004 referendum, says she "would be surprised if the Ho-Chunk were trying to convert the bingo hall into a casino."
Falk spokeswoman Joanne Haas says tribal officials contacted Falk's office earlier this week, but the two sides have not met yet.
George Twigg, a spokesman for Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, notes that while Cieslewicz opposed converting Dejope to a casino, the current plans still call for it to remain a bingo hall.
"These are electronic games, but they're still bingo," Twigg said. "It's up to the feds to decide if they're going beyond bingo."
Still bingo? Federal law gives only the states and the tribes, which are considered sovereign entities, control over gaming.
And state and tribal officials say that despite all the hype, bingo is still the name of the game at Dejope.
At issue is whether the new games constitute so-called Class II or Class III games, a designation for games and gambling devices set by the federal National Indian Gaming Commission.
Casino games - such as poker, blackjack, and slots - are considered Class III and are subject to regulatory agreements, known as gaming compacts, between states and American Indian tribes.
Bingo, however, is considered a Class II game and is regulated only by the tribes themselves and the National Indian Gaming Commission.
Dejope is the only Class II facility in the state; Wisconsin's 11 American Indian tribes operate 17 casinos around the state.
The Ho-Chunk operate casinos - the biggest near Wisconsin Dells, another near Black River Falls, and a third near Nekoosa. The tribe also operates an ancillary site - featuring only video gaming - near Tomah.
Both Ho-Chunk spokeswoman Littlejohn and Sean Dilweg, a spokesman for the state Department of Administration, say the new games offered at Dejope are clearly considered Class II games under the federal rules.
The state checked with the National Indian Gaming Commission "and those are, in fact, Class II games over there. How they want to change the bingo hall is up to them, " Dilweg said, referring to the Ho-Chunk.
Although the billboards advertising the renovation suggest Sin City-style stage shows, those apparently aren't part of the renovation plan. Littlejohn says while there have been changes to the entertainment area, which used to consist of a stage in the main bingo hall, "nothing is planned at the moment, but there is the opportunity for that."
Dilweg acknowledged that while the new bingo machines resemble slot machines, "what constitutes Class II machines has evolved through a whole series of federal court decisions."
The most critical variable is whether players are playing against each other, as they do in traditional bingo games, or whether they are playing against the house, as they do in traditional casino gaming.
Nemoir, however, points to proposed regulations by the National Indian Gaming Commission released earlier this year that he contends would restrict games in use at Dejope.
Those rules include requiring that players play against each other with the electronic games; that they must use bingo cards, although the cards may be electronic; that players cannot "auto-dab" numbers on their electronic bingo cards, but must instead touch the screen at least once during every game; and that the electronic cards must take up at least half of the screen at all times.
A consultant's study of the proposed changes to the National Indian Gaming Commission's rules indicated that none of the bingo games in place at Dejope earlier this year would meet those standards.
Instead, the study by the Los Angeles-based Analysis Group warned that if the rules are enacted, "the (Ho-Chunk) Nation would have no choice to replace the existing Class II machines" with new ones that meet the rules.
Nemoir says other tribes have already taken steps to bring their machines in line with those new rules, "but the Ho-Chunk and Dejope are going in the opposite direction" by nearly tripling the number of video bingo games and eliminating the paper games altogether.
Littlejohn says there is no "gray area" about the machines in use at Dejope and that they comply with both current and proposed gaming commission rules.
"There have to be other people in the facility playing so that there's always someone to play against," she says. "As long as you play against each other, it's always going to be Class II."
She adds that since Nemoir hasn't seen the games at Dejope, his criticisms of the games aren't valid.
But in a meeting with gaming commission regulators earlier this year, Ho-Chunk officials warned that the proposed rules would slow the pace of play and that, in turn, would create "a drastic drop in profitability" by making players less likely to want to play them.
In one aside, officials suggested that if such a loss in business would occur, the Dejope facility should be "grandfathered" into becoming a full-scale Class III casino.
Touchy subject: Off-reservation gaming has been a touchy subject for years in Wisconsin because it creates a potential competition between tribes with established highly profitable casinos on their reservations - such as the Potawatomi, who operate a huge casino in Milwaukee - and those hoping to cash in by moving to high-traffic locations such as Kenosha and Beloit on the Illinois border and Shullsburg on the Minnesota border.
The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs would have to approve any such off-reservation plans first. If the BIA approves them, it would be up to Gov. Jim Doyle to decide whether to allow the facilities.
Doyle promised earlier this year to make any such decisions "transparent" if the BIA approves off-reservation gaming in Wisconsin.
While the Ho-Chunk have not been major players in the political arena, groups affiliated with both on- and off-reservation tribal gaming have been.
According to the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, tribal gaming interests spent more than $1.3 million on this year's gubernatorial race, with most of that money going to boost Doyle and to defeat Republican Rep. Mark Green, who proposed tough limits on off-reservation gaming.
Nemoir's group has also been active in recent years. While its literature describes Enough! as a coalition of groups opposed to off-reservation casinos, Nemoir has consistently refused to say who those member groups are. That has prompted speculation that the group is a front for tribes seeking to tamp down competition from each other.
Littlejohn argues that the Ho-Chunk Nation represents a special case when it comes to off-reservation gambling because the tribe has never had a reservation in Wisconsin - so all of its gaming sites are technically off-reservation.
"We don't even factor into that at all," she says. |
