Kansas vows tough fight as tribal casino nears final OK

Rick Alm

Thursday, July 15, 1999 | 10:35 a.m.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Plans for a tribal casino in Miami County, Kan., have advanced to final review stage before the U.S. Department of the Interior -- setting up a potentially bitter battle with indignant Kansas authorities.

"This is the first time ever in this country that the federal government has cast aside a state's legitimate role in matters such as this, and we will not simply sit idly by and take it," said Mike Matson, a spokesman for Kansas Gov. Bill Graves.

The Interior Department's action takes place under rules it unilaterally imposed on the states earlier this year. Those rules are being challenged in court by Florida and Alabama.

Left unchallenged, the rules empower Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to license tribal casinos and allow them to be regulated by another federal agency with virtually no input or oversight from state or local governments.

Graves was notified Monday of the Interior Department's decision regarding the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma's casino plans for a site near La Cygne Lake about 20 miles south of the Johnson County line.

In his letter to Graves, Bureau of Indian Affairs gaming management director George T. Skibine advised the governor that the state had 60 days to respond.

"Within 60 days you can expect something from the state," Matson said Tuesday.

But Matson indicated that response most likely would be a lawsuit seeking to block any further action by the Interior Department.

Florida sued earlier this year when the Interior Department granted similar casino clearance to that state's Seminole Tribe. Alabama later joined in that action, which is pending.

Skibine said Tuesday that the governor of Nebraska also had been advised in recent days that a casino proposal by the Santee Sioux Tribe in that state also had advanced to final review.

"We hope we can work with the states," Nedra Darling, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said. "These rules have good intentions to work together. We're not there yet."

The Interior Department has heard complaints like Kansas' since the rules were first proposed early in 1996.

"We respectfully disagree with the arguments raised by the states," Babbitt's office said this spring in a written statement explaining how the rules work.

After years of litigation against Kansas and others, the Miami Tribe last year won various court and federal agency rulings declaring its historic tribal lands in Kansas eligible for casino gambling under the 1988 federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

However, those approvals came in the midst of a fight between Babbitt and Congress over the agency's rule-making authority under the gaming act.

The rules empower the secretary, as a last resort, to approve and license casinos when tribes and their state governments are unable to negotiate mutually acceptable tribal gambling agreements.

Under Interior's new rules, states are invited to participate in the review process and propose alternatives regarding the type of gambling allowed and other details.

But the final decisions rest with the interior secretary, who "will take those (state) views into account in his decision-making process," the agency said in its explanatory statement.

Congress in 1997 blocked Babbitt from implementing the rules, but that moratorium expired March 31. The rules went into effect May 12.

On May 25, the Miami Tribe submitted its casino plans to the department, which advised Graves on Monday that the tribe's plan met federal requirements.

Besides the states' rights issue, Matson said Kansas was fighting the Miami proposal because it would compete with four other tribal casinos in the state.

"There's a fundamental fairness issue as it relates to the four indigenous (Kansas) tribes who have been in the state since the 1800s and who have played by the rules," Matson said.

"The governor doesn't believe it is fair to them to allow an out-of-state group to play on the same field."