Tribe overcomes history, neighbors to win casino

Andrew Kramer

Wednesday, July 23, 2003 | 9:31 a.m.

FLORENCE, Ore. -- Francis Somday stood in slacks and a tie, his loafers brushing the dry grass and sandy soil on a hill where a Siuslaw Indian village bustled more than a century ago.

The coastal site overlooks an estuary of reeds and brackish water on the north fork of the Siuslaw River where tribal members once fished for salmon and gathered oysters and clams.

An Indian cemetery surrounded by Douglas firs holds unmarked graves dating back centuries.

These cultural ties were key to the tribe's legal victory this month over local residents who opposed plans to put a tribal casino on the site of the former village.

"This is the only hope for self sufficiency of this tribe," said Somday, the tribal administrator. A sign at the property's entrance reads: "Yes. Casino coming soon."

When it opens, the casino will be the first in Oregon on nonreservation land.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski last week announced he would not appeal a federal judge's dismissal of a lawsuit against building the casino, ending a six-year dispute.

Local residents are not happy about his decision.

"If a casino comes to Florence, the town will change and not for the better," said anti-casino organizer Debby Todd, who is part Cherokee but opposes Indian gaming.

"It's real nice here. You go to the grocery store and the post office and you got all your socializing done."

Residents packed council meetings, voicing fears of traffic snarls, gambling addiction and an influx of seedy characters, and the vague sense that the sleepy, oceanfront community of Victorian homes and shops selling knickknacks and lawn sculptures made from driftwood would change forever. "No casino" billboards popped up along the coastal highway, U.S. 101.

At issue, say casino opponents, is the practice of "casino shopping," or tribes from California to Connecticut snapping up land for casinos near large markets.

People Against a Casino Town, an anti-casino group, collected 2,300 signatures in this town of 7,500 people nestled along the Siuslaw river 150 miles north of the California border.

Mayor Alan Burns, a part-timer who is also owner of the town's only funeral home, rejected an offer from the tribes to pay for an additional policeman.

In a letter to the governor, Burns said the tribe misled Florence by first saying it would build a cultural center on the site of the former Indian village -- called the Hatch Tract -- and later announcing plans for a casino.

The city council voted to exclude the tract from water and sewage service.

The Hatch Tract is a promising site for a casino. It will be the closest casino to Eugene, the state's third-largest city.

The tribe is unapologetic. Officials are quick to cite Oregon coastal Indians' history of persecution as the reason they had no significant property before purchasing the site of their former village in 1996.

"Congress didn't pass the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act for the city of Florence," Somday said. "It was created so tribes could become self sufficient."

Under the act, only land owned by tribes prior to 1988 qualified for casino development -- but there were exceptions for tribes that recently took land into trust because of cultural ties.

Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton wrote in a letter last fall to New York Gov. George E. Pataki that it is unclear whether tribes have a legal right to off-reservation gaming.

"While I do not signal an absolute bar on off-reservation gaming, I am extremely concerned that the principles underlying the enactment of the (law) are being stretched in ways that Congress never imagined," she wrote.

In the starkest example, Maryann Martin, who grew up in an inner city home in Los Angeles, learned later in life that her mother was the last surviving member of the Augustine Band of Cahuilla Mission Indians. The tribe was recognized in 1991.

Because of the 1988 law, Martin was able to build a 349-slot casino on restored tribal land southeast of Palm Springs and is its sole owner.

Local and state governments have little say in the process that reshapes entire communities.

Kulongoski's predecessor as Oregon governor -- fellow Democrat John Kitzhaber -- had sued to stop plans of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, who now number about 700, for a tribal casino on the site of the Siuslaw's former village in Florence.

For decades, the Hatch Tract was owned by a tribal member. The confederated tribe could not own it because under federal law the tribe did not exist.

The confederated tribe lost its federal status in 1954 under the Western Oregon Termination Act, passed by Congress as the tribe dwindled to a few hundred members.

It marked the culmination of a century of turmoil begun in 1855, when the U.S. Army cleared out Indian villages up and down the Oregon central coast, including the Hatch Tract site, and marched the inhabitants to a reservation. About 1,500 Indians died of starvation or illness.

About 200 surviving members won federal recognition in 1984, but had no land. They bought the uninhabited 98-acre former village site in 1996, and took it into trust based on cultural ties a few years later.

The confederated tribes are the only federally recognized Indian tribe in Oregon without a gaming operation.

Las Vegas-based gambling developer ROI will build and manage the casino on the Hatch Tract. Greene Meyer & McElroy, a Boulder, Colo., firm specializing in Indian gaming law, is representing the tribe.

ROI and the tribe plan a Las Vegas-style casino floor that will cost $26 million to build. ROI is solely owned and operated by Tim Rose, president and one of the owners of the Mountain High casino in Black Hawk, Colo.

Rose has managed Atlantic City casinos for Park Place Entertainment Corp. and headed up the Las Vegas gaming practice of accountant Coopers & Lybrand in the late 1990s.

Rose, who has also managed tribal casinos in the Pacific Northwest, established a relationship with the Siuslaw tribe in 1995 and has remained a consultant for the tribe throughout the legal battle.

The casino is expected to net $10 million to $12 million a year, and overnight will become the largest employer in Florence with 300 or so jobs.

The Las Vegas Sun

contributed to this story.