A federal appeals court last week ruled in favor of the Northern California Mechoopda Indian Tribe in its battle against Butte County, which wants to prevent the tribe from building a casino in the county, south of Chico.
The county is deciding whether to appeal, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. Tribal Chairman Dennis Ramirez says he doubts they will appeal.
“I don’t think they’re going to [appeal] anymore. People are saying enough is enough,” told the Chico News and Review in a phone interview, “They’re concerned about alcohol, drugs, people spending their money. We have those concerns as well—we don’t want people to lose their paychecks. We just want to be able to do the right thing and move forward.”
If the ruling sticks the tribe will move forward to building a casino on part of 645 acres near the intersection of Highways 99 and 149.
County Counsel Bruce Alpert has characterized the whole process of legal rulings against the county as unfair. The county didn’t get enough time to review materials submitted by the tribe and one of its rebuttals was deemed as being too late.
The tribe is one of many that the federal government tried to disband in the 1950s and 1960s. It lost much of its land to the city of Chico. Until the 1990s when the courts began to push back against the termination of tribes, which prompted many to apply for recognition.
This was granted but the land was gone. The tribe applied to put 645 acres into trust. The land is part of their ancestral home, they say, including the Sutter Buttes, a small mountain range considered a spiritual center by many tribes.
The land was put into trust in 2002. Plans for a casino were unveiled in 2006 and soon the county sued in federal court challenging the National Indian Gaming Commission’s designation of the land as “restored lands.”
They claimed and continue to claim that the land was not eligible to be restored. The county challenges the tribe’s right to exist, claiming that it didn’t exist in the historical past.
Tribal members, especially the elders, were embittered by claims that they were not Native Americans. “That hurt our elders really bad,” Ramirez told the Review. “That’s why we kept fighting. When you get pushed around, you get up and keep pushing forward.”
Alpert explained the county’s rationale. “We were challenging their right to trust—not the Mechoopda tribe as a tribe, per se, but their historical right to that land as a tribe,” he said.
With the latest court ruling Ramirez would like to work with the county on plans for a casino that all will be proud of.
That decision is up to the county Board of Supervisors. Alpert told the Review “If we don’t do that or it proved unsuccessful, we would then deal with the state and the tribe on a state compact and agreement for providing services.”
The facility, being rather isolated, would need a host of services from the county, including emergency services. The roads will probably also need to be improved to bring the public to the casino, said Alpert.
