The city of Ridgecrest and the Ridgecrest Area Convention and Visitors Bureau in Kern County, California have gone on record supporting the casino that the Timbisha Shoshone proposes—mainly because it will open a flood of money for the region, as much as $30 million over 20 years.
The tribe’s request to put land into trust is now being processed by the Department of the Interior.
Ridgecrest City Manager Ron Strand recently returned from Washington D.C., where he learned that the city could make as much as $30 million over the next 20 years. These figures are tentative, he told the Daily Independent, because the city has not yet done its own economic impact analysis.
The trip was to allow Bureau of Indian Affairs Director James Cason to gather information on the proposal from the city’s viewpoint.
He said that when the casino is fully built out it could contribute at least $1 million to the city from a combination of a tribal-city municipal services agreement and hotel taxes. Three of the city’s five council members support the tribal casino and authorized Strand’s trip to Washington earlier this month.
Strand said, “I left with the sense that Cason had the questions he wanted answered.”
Recently the Visitors Bureau published a “position paper” that declared “The Ridgecrest Area Convention & Visitors’ Bureau, as well as the Ridgecrest hotels and motels, believe the addition of a Native American Casino will increase hotel and motel occupancy as reported by numerous sources.”
It added, “Ridgecrest has the unique opportunity to become a major travel and tourism stopover/hub with the addition of this Native American Casino development which includes components of NOT ONLY a casino, but also a hotel, large civic event space and restaurant.”
The tribe and the city argue that the casino would be well placed to attract traffic enroute to Death Valley and Mammoth and motorists traveling on Highways 178, 395 and 14.
The paper noted that the city annually holds a Petroglyph Festival, and declares, “As a community, if we have embraced Petroglyphs as part of our identity, then how can we reject the Native American Casino by the same tribe which the Ridgecrest City Council had voted on and APPROVED the Native American Casino’s development?”
