The casino project stall leads to misplaced blame

Although there’s still a chance the compacts for the proposed Los Coyote/Big Lagoon Rancheria off-reservation casino in Barstow to be approved by the state legislature, it seems very unlikely it will happen by the end of their 2007 session Sept. 11.

This is the second year in a row the compacts have not been able to get through the legislative process for approval. They actually made it further last year than this year. The compacts expire Sept. 17, and while the governor and the tribes could just draft up a new version of the compacts with new deadlines, we’ve come to conclude the state legislature is simply not going to allow it to happen. (And before the competing Chemehuevi celebrate, we don’t believe a tribe that already has a casino will ever be allowed an off-reservation casino either, so they haven’t “won” anything other than the pleasure of being used by San Manuel to eliminate a potential competing development — we hope the Chemehuevi at least got something out of it)

We think local Barstow leaders realize it’s pretty much over, too, which is why there’s again a sudden buzz of angry bickering between different factions about he future of the projects, and of course, the laying of blame.

It would be easy to lay a lot of blame on the local level. Barstow Mayor Lawrence Dale stubbornly resisted a referendum for Barstow residents to simply vote on whether they supported Indian casinos in general. This opened the door for opponents in Sacramento to question whether the community actually supported the project and created an opportunity for project-killing Measure H to be deceptively marketed as a pro-casino initiative. And speaking of Measure H, promoter Manuel Gurule to this day still apparently refuses to accept that the point of Measure H was to kill the Los Coyotes/Big Lagoon project, even though most voters saw through it. For most of us, such deceptive tactics would cause us to rethink our allies.

But really, blaming Dale or Gurule assumes that they ever had the ability to influence the outcome of this fight in Sacramento, and we don’t believe that they ever did. This isn’t an insult to the influence of these men, but an acknowledgment of the limited influence of our region in this particular area.

Clearly, the powerful gaming tribes were calling the shots here, but even so, they’re behaving no differently from most other businesses, governments, and lobbying organizations by protecting their own interests. By blaming the tribes for the failure of the project to pass, we’re blaming the symptoms, not the disease.

The tribes are powerful because they throw around money, and here’s the important part — people take it. Tribes give millions of dollars to state legislators’ campaigns and political parties to influence decisions. We have a tendency to blame the tribes, the corporations, and the lobbyists for these corrupt tactics, but if it works, then why shouldn’t they use them?

The blame lays squarely on the politicians who take the money and then look for weaselly ways to justify their votes — and the complicated laws behind Indian gaming always allow a technical justification for any decision that just happens to also support the status quo.