Four mayors of West Valley, Arizona cities recently wrote an editorial opposing the Tohono O’odham Nation’s plan to build a casino in the Glendale area. Jim Lane of Scottsdale, Linda Kavanagh of Fountain Hills, John Insalaco of Apache Junction and Thomas Schoaf of Litchfield Park urged Arizona U.S. Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake “to immediately force action on the Keep the Promise Act of 2015, which will prevent the Tohono O’odham Nation from moving forward with its gaming facility near homes, schools, places of worship and child-care centers.” The mayors said federal court lawsuits still could stop the project, but Congressional action could “prevent this monument to greed.”
Currently the tribe is building a temporary casino structure in Glendale with 1,100 slot machines and a 1,000-seat bingo hall that could open before the end of the year.
The mayors wrote that the Tohono O’odham Nation’s had a “secret plan” and that it’s “breaking faith with the voters of Arizona who in 2002 narrowly approved the current tribal gaming compacts,” proving the “path to the construction of this casino has been pockmarked by deceit.” They said in the years of compact negotiation leading up to the 2002 election, the Tohono O’odham and other Arizona tribes “promised over and again that these compacts would preserve the balance of tribal gaming statewide, and that the casinos would be restricted to traditional tribal lands. The Phoenix metro area, the tribes promised, would get no additional casinos. None.”
However, the mayors noted, the Tohono O’odham were “actively seeking land in Glendale” and also that the tribe “misled state negotiators and other tribes regarding its true intentions for its fourth casino.”
But in 2014, the federal government allowed the Tohono O’odham Nation the ability to build as many as four casinos on county islands throughout the Valley, “without consulting with impacted communities or being subject to any Maricopa County zoning requirements.” In addition, the mayors cautioned if the four Tohono O’odham’s casinos are built, “you can be sure the massive gaming corporations who run Vegas and America’s horse tracks again will target Arizona for expansion, as they have for years. Such off-reservation casinos would represent the ultimate transgression against balanced gaming in Arizona.”
They concluded such an “ugly scenario is hardly impossible. After all, when voters in 2002 approved the current gaming compacts, no one could have envisioned Tohono O’odham opening a massive casino more than 100 miles from its home, in the middle of a Valley neighborhood.”
