Four months after New York’s Seneca Nation said it would no longer share millions of gaming revenue dollars with the state and local governments, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Seneca President Todd Gates are going to meet to try to resolve the dispute.
Speaking at a recent event in Buffalo, where the tribe operates one of three casinos in New York, Gates said he expects the meeting with governor, the first since the payments stopped, to come off later this month.
The Seneca Tribal Council announced in March that its next quarterly payment to the state would be the last under its federally mandated gaming compact with New York authorizing the tribe to operate casino-style gambling.
The 2002 agreement, which the Senecas say expired in 2016, calls for the tribe to pay the state 20 percent of its slot machine revenue?a sum exceeding $1.5 billion since it came into force 14 years ago. The state, in turn, has shared 25 percent of the money with the governments of the three cities?Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Salamanca?hosting the casinos, roughly $110 million a year combined, a subsidy that has grown into a major source of funding for municipal operations. In Salamanca, for example, city officials are expecting $5.9 million this year, more than half of its $10 million budget.
In halting the payments the Senecas say they’re merely adhering to the letter of the compact. The state reads it differently and contends the revenue-sharing is still in force, citing an amendment added in 2013 that resolved a near-identical dispute over the introduction of machine gaming at the state’s racetracks. The tribe claimed two of the new racinos violated provisions in the original deal guaranteeing it a gaming monopoly over a large swathe of western New York.
Some say the new dispute is also about competition, specifically, the introduction of large-scale commercial casinos in south-central New York, in the Hudson River Valley, in the Catskills and near Syracuse in the popular Finger Lakes region.
Publicly, the Senecas have not mentioned this in connection with the suspended payments, but the tribe has indicated its displeasure with the location of the Finger Lakes casino, the $440 million del Lago Resort & Casino, which opened in February just seven miles east of a line that defines the tribe’s exclusivity zone.
Gates, meanwhile, has acknowledged the dispute is “stressing everybody out” in the communities affected.
“We’d like to help our neighbors and move forward,” he said.
