Controversy surrounding the casino proposed by Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Nation is dividing that state’s gaming tribes.
Proposition 202, which authorized tribal casinos in Arizona, was narrowly passed by voters in 2002. It led to the tribal state gaming compacts that govern the tribal casinos that operate in the state.
In the years since it passed the state has been paid over $1 billion, funds used for education, tourism and many other state programs.
The compacts provide a process, dubbed a “poison pill” by which a tribe can protest actions that it considers breaking the compact. Previously tribes have threatened to invoke the “poison pill” when the legislature considered allowing slot machines at racetracks.
Currently some tribes are considering invoking it to try to stop the Tohono O’odham Nation from completing and operating its proposed casino in Glendale.
The tribe’s casino has been the subject of several lawsuits, all decided in favor of the Tohonos and a current effort in Congress to pass a law that would prevent the tribe from operating the casino.
If the poison pill is invoked the amount of money the state collects would be drastically reduced and limits on casinos and slot machines would be abolished.
Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis told the Arizona Capitol Times “Our biggest concern is that breaking the compacts creates chaos in the Arizona gaming market.”
Many legal experts say that the Glendale casino will not invoke the “poison pill.” That doesn’t stop tribes such as the Gila River tribe and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community from strongly opposing the casino, and urging Congress to keep it from opening.
They argue that the Glendale casino violates promises that supporters of Proposition 202 made that there would be no more casinos in the Phoenix metro area and violates the spirit of the 2002 compacts.
Federal Judge David G. Campbell ruled in 2013 that a verbal promise made to voters wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. He declared, “No reasonable reading of the Compact could lead a person to conclude that it prohibited new casinos in the Phoenix area.”
He added that the compacts themselves do not prohibit more casinos in the Phoenix area. He wrote, “As a result, the Court concludes that the parties did not reach such an agreement and that the Nation’s construction of a casino on the Glendale-area land will not violate the Compact.”
According to Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community President Delbert Ray, Sr. quoted by the Times, “It works only if all parties, including the Tohono O’odham Nation, abide by the promises made in 2002. That policy was adopted around the core principles that gaming would be limited to existing reservation lands, limited in the scope, size and number of casinos and there would be no additional tribal casinos permitted in the Phoenix metropolitan area.”
The Tohonos purchased the land for the casino with money paid it by the federal government to make up for its reservation being inundated by a federal dam project in the 1980s. The Gila Bend Indian Reservation Lands Replacement Act of 1986 authorized the purchase.
Arizona’s two U.S. Senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake have joined forces with Congressmen Trent Franks, Paul Gosar, Ann Kirkpatrick, Matt Salmon and David Schweikert to push the Keep the Promise Act of 2015, specifically aimed at the Glendale casino.
The bill would forbid Class II and Class III gaming within the Phoenix area on land put into trust for a tribe after 2013. The Tohonos are the only tribe that fit that description.
