Sho-Ban compact ratified, stage set for court battle over casino machines

Bob Fick

Wednesday, March 29, 2000 | 1:41 a.m.

BOISE, Idaho - State lawmakers set the stage Wednesday for a federal courtroom showdown over the legality of thousands of lucrative electronic gambling machines in reservation casinos throughout Idaho.

"We need to get on with it and resolve the dispute," Republican Sen. Moon Wheeler of American Falls said.

The Senate voted 27-8 to send to Gov. Dirk Kempthorne the House-passed legislation ratifying the gambling compact the governor signed with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes six weeks ago.

As part of the deal to secure the federally required compact, outlining conditions for casino operations on eastern Idaho's Fort Hall Reservation, the federal courts will decide whether the so-called electronic pull tab machines are illegal slot machines as the state claims or nothing more than an electronic - and legal - rendition of the lottery games the state offers.

Shoshone-Bannock leaders and their allies maintain the legislation involves only their operations and have objected to the campaign leaders of the three northern Idaho tribes have waged against authorizing the court test.

"They need to find out where they stand so they can progress," said Sen. Evan Frasure, whose district includes part of the Shoshone-Bannock Reservation. "The other tribes need to butt out."

But leaders of the Nez Perce, Kootenai and Coeur d'Alene tribes, which all signed compacts in 1992, have insisted any court decision will directly affect their casinos, where the machines generate the lion's share of the profits.

Their allies in the Senate argued that the state was taking a gamble by ceding the issue to the courts since a federal judge could theoretically expand the kind of games tribes can operate. But the tribes' past track record in court on gambling has not been that favorable.

State officials have been ambivalent about reservation gambling since it began. While objecting to gambling in principle, many have had no choice but to acknowledge the major boost the casinos have given to depressed reservation economies.

"It's brought a sense of pride and self worth," Wheeler said. "It's brought them some hope for the future."

The prospect of an adverse court ruling, however, has created enough uncertainty about the future financial viability of tribal casinos that the Coeur d'Alene Tribe was forced to halt work on conversion of their operation into a destination resort with a 110-room hotel, conference center, golf course and indoor arena.

As the House did earlier this month, the Senate declined to delay for a year the onset of the court case to see if negotiations between Kempthorne and tribal leaders can produce a compromise acceptable to all parties. Kempthorne had privately endorsed the moratorium but declined to take that position publicly.

Without a compact, the Shoshone-Bannocks have been vulnerable for years to being shutdown by federal agents. That never materialized although the state requested intervention several times in the 1990s. Also driving the desire for a compact was the impending change in national administrations and the uncertainty over the attitude the next president - either Democrat Al Gore or Republican George W. Bush - will take toward tribal gambling.

The talks between the state and tribes have focused on the course former Gov. Phil Batt recommended after shortly after leaving office - finding a way to let existing machines remain in operations while slapping some kind of restriction on future expansion.

Like Kempthorne, Batt spent much of his tenure looking for a way of ending the dispute over the machines' legality. But a special task force he created to assess the situation reached no definitive conclusion, and he left office with the issue still up in the air.

In his memoir published last fall, however, Batt said he had reached the conclusion that the tribes should be allowed to keep the machines because of the economic benefits and the fact that gambling has not extended beyond reservation boundaries as he once feared it would.

Tribal leaders have also repeatedly said that they view the casinos as only a means to the end of economic diversification on their reservations. The casinos, they say, are generating the cash needed to develop and launch business enterprises in other areas.