Torres-Martinez tribe OKs new compact

Don Thompson

Thursday, Aug. 14, 2003 | 9:15 a.m.

SACRAMENTO -- The Davis administration signed its first new Indian gambling compact in 3 1/2 years Wednesday, one that will bring some money to the hard-hit state treasury. But officials cautioned the deal has little bearing on negotiations with 95 other tribes.

The Torres-Martinez Band of Desert Cahuilla Indians of Thermal agreed to give the state a share of its profits from 350 slot machines to be installed at a Highway 86 truck stop it plans to open in Imperial County in about a year.

The tribe also won permission to install 1,650 slots at a casino it wants to build on up to 640 acres near Interstate 10 in Coachella in Riverside County. But the terms of any contribution to the state from those machines will be negotiated later, after pacts are signed with other tribes.

Gov. Gray Davis has been pushing the tribes to help trim the state's huge budget deficit as his administration renegotiates compacts it hurriedly signed in 1999 with 61 tribes. Another 35 tribes that did not have compacts, including the Torres-Martinez, also are involved in the talks.

Davis said one of his goals was met by the Torres-Martinez tribe's agreement to pay the state 3 percent of its first year net winnings, 4 percent in its second year, and 5 percent of its winnings in the third and subsequent years. Officials could not estimate how much money that will bring.

The tribe's agreement to work with local cities and counties to offset any problems from the casinos also met another goal, Davis said. But the tribe had no choice, because that was required by a federal law implementing a court settlement of the tribe's suit over the 1905 accidental aqueduct breach that created the Salton Sea and inundated 9,000 acres of the Torres-Martinez band's 12,000- acre reservation.