Off reservation expansion?
News to digest concerning Indian Gaming and what the future may hold for our local Chumash Casino should they ever decide to look into off-reservation expansion. In a Feb. 13, 2007 letter to 35 tribes nationwide, James E. Cason, Associate Deputy Secretary of the Interior, indicated that new rules would apply when tribes look to expand to off-reservation sites.
“We anticipate changes to the rules that may result in fewer off-reservation properties being accepted into trust," Cason said in his letter. "In particular, we expect to consider a paradigm where the likelihood of accepting off-reservation land into trust decreases with the distance the subject parcel is from the tribe's established reservation or ancestral lands and the majority of tribal members." Also in the letter he indicated that ”community opposition will be heavily weighed” when considering off-reservation expansion.
It seems the Federal and State Governments are beginning to see the importance of enabling local governments and the citizens of the communities affected by casinos to play a major role when tribes pursue off-reservation expansion.
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1 comments:
Cason was addressing specifically off-reservation proposals, or proposals on land tribes otherwise acquired after 1988; not proposals on land that tribes had in trust prior to 1988 (when IGRA -- the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act -- was first adopted).
Local communities have relatively little influence over expansions on existing reservation lands.
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