When tribal gaming was in its infancy, the tribes and Las Vegas were at sword’s points. Today, gaming tribes are buying casino properties in the gaming mecca.
In October, Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment (MGE) was approved to run a Las Vegas casino resort. Recently, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians bought the Palms for $650 million. Now Florida’s Seminole Tribe is mulling over buying a property in Las Vegas through its Hard Rock International.
Since the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, tribal gaming has been growing until by 2017 it was a $32 billion industry accounting for almost half of all gaming in the U.S.
But last year’s purchase by MGE was the first time a tribe has purchased a property in Las Vegas.
San Diego State University professor Kate Spilde, an expert on tribal gaming, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “This is really a natural evolution. Once you’ve kind of built out your own property and maximized what you can do in the market that you’re in … we see tribes then looking to go into commercial expansion into a casino that’s not on tribal land.”
Operating a casino in Las Vegas also adds to the cachet of tribes’ home casinos and allows patrons to play at the tribal casino and save up points to qualify for a Las Vegas vacation.
San Manuel band CEO Laurens Vosloo told the Review-Journal that the tribe has been looking to diversify for two decades but settled on Las Vegas recently because it is close and customers know it well. He said, “Who doesn’t want to be in Las Vegas It’s the gaming mecca of the world and the place to be. … It’s a natural and a good fit for us to have an asset there that we can send our customers to, contribute to that economy and be part of the Las Vegas community.”
There are differences between tribal and commercial gaming. Tribal casinos operate under the National Indian Gaming Commission and is generally reinvested in the tribe and tribal services. Commercial casinos operate under the state they are in. Unlike tribal casinos, they pay taxes to the state.
Tribes also tend to invest more in their communities. Said Vosloo,
“We want to make sure everybody knows we committed to the community, to people of Las Vegas, before we start doing business there. That’s just a way that the tribe does business.”
