[PEN-L:755] Costly Fight Rages in California Over Indian Gambling Measure

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CA tribal gaming initiative article                                more options

Author:    Diane Hirshberg                                       author profile
Email:     nospam-dbh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                          view thread
Date:      1998/10/13
Forums:    alt.native
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Front page, NY Times today... interesting...

--Diane

October 13, 1998

Costly Fight Rages in California Over Indian Gambling Measure

----------

By TODD S. PURDUM


 HIGHLAND, Calif. -- A century after Indian wars roiled the West,
another battle is raging here over a ballot measure that would expand
the state's $1.4 billion Indian gambling industry. It pits California's
gaming tribes against an unlikely coalition of Nevada casinos, unions,
church groups and other businesses in what may become the most expensive
fight in California political history.

 A visit to the San Manuel Indian Bingo and Casino on a patch of tribal
land 60 miles east of Los Angeles makes the stakes clear. The afternoon
sun is still high, but the parking lot is filling fast, and inside the
smoky 90,000-square-foot gambling hall, the hopeful already sit glued to
most of the 1,000 video slot machines and to row after row of bingo
tables.

 This 24-hour no-frills casino is an economic miracle for the tiny San
Manuel tribe, which once scratched out an income raising apricots and
lived in shacks and trailers on a dusty 648-acre reservation. Now, 40
landscaped houses dot the hillsides behind the casino's walls, and
security officers on bicycles patrol newly paved roads.

 But the San Manuel Indians have a problem: They and about 40 other
tribes began installing slot machines over the last decade without first
reaching compacts with the state, as required by federal law. So Gov.
Pete Wilson and federal prosecutors consider their casinos illegal and
have moved to shut them down.

 In response, the gaming tribes are sponsoring a hotly contested ballot
measure in the Nov. 3 election that would allow broad expansion of
casino-style gaming on Indian lands statewide. In a potent illustration
of the power of gambling money in politics, it seems likely to set a new
record for spending on a ballot initiative here.

 Already, the two sides have raised at least $60 million and spent about
$53 million, mostly for a barrage of competing television commercials.
About $43 million has been raised by tribes, $22 million of it from the
San Manuel tribe alone, while opponents, led by the casino operators at
Hilton Hotels Corp. and Mirage Resorts Inc., who fear untaxed Indian
competition, have raised $15.5 million and spent $1 million more. The
previous spending record for a single measure was $57.5 million on a
securities fraud proposal two years ago; $84 million was spent on a
group of competing insurance reform measures in 1988.

 Public polls have shown the gambling measure, Proposition 5, winning
majority, but not overwhelming, support among voters, many of whom are
sympathetic to decades of Indian privation in a state that paid bounties
for Indian body parts in the 1850s.

 The gaming tribes contend that nothing less than their historic
sovereignty and economic survival is at stake, and their advertisements
feature members attesting that Indian gaming has broken the cycle of
poverty.

 "This is our livelihood," said Ken Ramirez, 38, vice-chairman of the
San Manuel tribe, who grew up on the reservation when it held only a
handful of families, with water too fetid to drink. He declined to
disclose the tribe's revenues from gaming, but noted that about 110
people now live on the reservation, where, with gambling proceeds, the
tribe has drilled 16 deep wells and plans to market bottled water
commercially.

 But opponents of Proposition 5 accuse the gaming tribes of scare
tactics. They say the tribes' campaign exaggerates the threat to Indian
welfare and obscures the real menace of a measure that would allow the
spread of gambling throughout the state, divert business from privately
operated theme parks, racetracks and card rooms and yet provide few
economic benefits over all, because Indian casinos pay no taxes on their
profits, though gamblers pay income taxes on their winnings.

 "Frankly, I think it's an incredible con game," said Frank Schubert,
who is managing the "No on 5" campaign for the Coalition Against
Unregulated Gambling, which has run ads in which a jogging couple is
stunned by a volcanic eruption of garish casino signs in their
neighborhood. "We've had millions and millions in TV ads bombarding the
state for months now about reservations getting electricity and being
able to be linoleum on a dirt floor, when in fact it's a handful of
tribes spending a fortune to keep a special deal."

 About one-third of the 557 Indian tribes around the nation, including
tribes in Connecticut, Minnesota and Wisconsin, now offer some form of
gambling. The 1988 federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act affirmed tribes'
rights to offer bingo, and, subject to negotiated compacts with
individual states, slot machine games. But some governors have
complained about vagaries in the law and Congress has debated making
clarifications.

 In other states where Indians are either seeking gambling compacts or
negotiating the renewal of existing ones, the California debate is being
closely watched.


 "From a national perspective, many states and tribes have already
resolved this," said John Dossett, general counsel of the National
Congress of American Indians in Washington, which represents 250 tribes.
"If this issue were to be resolved in California, there'd be less
pressure in Congress."

 But resolution here seems unlikely any time soon. Opponents of
Proposition 5 warn that if it passes, it will immediately be tied up in
years of litigation, and could well violate the California State
Constitution's ban on "Nevada or New Jersey-type casinos."

 "We're in for a long battle here instead of a politically negotiated
solution in which both sides say, 'Let's make this work,"' said Cathy
Christian, counsel to the Coalition Against Unregulated Gambling.

 The gaming tribes say they are prepared to fight. They complain that
they have been caught in an impossible situation because, eager for
revenue, they began offering gambling while their right to do so was
still being litigated. Since then Wilson, a Republican and a foe of
gambling in general, has refused to negotiate a compact with any tribe
that was already gambling.

 "Without Proposition 5, the gaming that currently exists on Indian
lands in California could be taken away from the tribes," said Waltona
Manion, a spokeswoman for the tribal alliance known as Californians for
Indian Self-Reliance. "Why remove something that's working, and that's
proven to have taken these tribes off of welfare dependency and put them
on the road to self-sufficiency?"

 But Wilson has offered a clear alternative. Last spring, he reached an
agreement with the Pala Band of Mission Indians in San Diego County that
would allow a new form of video slot machine but outlaw those now used
by gambling tribes. In the months since, 10 more tribes, some of them
under threat of federal action, have signed the Pala compact, which
limits each tribe to 199 of the new machines but allows them to lease
rights for unused machines to other tribes, up to a maximum of 990 for
any tribe, with a statewide cap of 19,900. The State Legislature
ratified the agreements in August.

 Most of the gaming tribes contend that Wilson, who is barred from
seeking a third term this year, refused to negotiate in good faith, as
required by the 1988 federal law. So Proposition 5 leaves little to
chance, flatly requiring the state to grant a compact allowing slot
machines in perpetuity for any tribe that wanted them, though, as is now
the case, the measure would only allow games in which players bet
against a pool of other players' money, not against the casino house
itself, as in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

 Opponents of the measure contend that it is not needed to protect
Indian gambling, and to hammer home the point, they are now running
television advertisements featuring Paula Lorenzo, head of the Rumsey
Band of Wintun Indians, which signed the Pala compact and is expanding
its Cache Creek Casino 45 miles northwest of Sacramento.

 "We're doing all this without Prop. 5," Ms. Lorenzo says in the
30-second commercial as she walks through the construction site. "No
tribe needs Prop. 5 to operate casinos."

 For their part, supporters of the measure have accused their fellow
tribes of being turncoats recruited by "the big Nevada casinos," to
oppose the proposition, in an echo of internecine betrayals of the past.

 At the San Manuel Casino, which draws 3,000 to 4,000 gamblers a day and
where the card dealers now wear bold "No on 5" T-shirts, players said
they supported the measure.

 "What's going to happen to these people if Proposition 5 doesn't go
through?" asked Ruth Kennedy, a retired nurse who comes every day to
play bingo and the slots from late afternoon until the wee hours of the
morning, and who once won a $40,000 jackpot. "Why is Vegas and them so
upset with the Indian halls? You can't tell me this place doesn't do
things for the community."

 In fact, according to Steven Lengel, the casino's customer services
director, it sponsors a range of school and community programs in
Highland and the neighboring towns of San Bernardino and Redlands, and
its uniformed security force of 250 is bigger than those of the three
local cities combined. It sells no alcohol, allows none on the premises
and employs more than 1,400 people, the vast majority of them local
residents.

 But opponents of the measure, including the California Labor Federation
AFL-CIO and the United Farm Workers, complain that it would exempt the
Indian casinos from environmental and worker health and safety laws, and
calls for distributing a maximum of 2 percent of the winnings from
casinos with more than 400 gambling machines to non-gaming tribes.

 "This idea that they're somehow spending all of their money to help
their poor brothers is just not true," Ms. Christian said.





Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

--
Diane Hirshberg
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