The planned third casino authorized under Massachusetts’ 2011 Expanded Gaming Law has run into its latest of a rash of legal entanglements, as the same resident group that has battled the planned Taunton casino of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe responded to its latest court loss with a new lawsuit likely to delay the project for many more months.
The dispute over the project goes back to 2016, shortly after the tribe broke ground for its planned $1 billion First Light Resort Casino. The project is located on 321 acres of land in Taunton, contiguous to the tribe’s Mashpee reservation, which the tribe purchased in 2012.
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) took the land into trust for the tribe in 2015. In 2016, a Taunton resident group headed by Lyndsey Littlefield—former Miss Taunton and Miss Massachusetts in the Miss America pageant—and her husband filed a lawsuit alleging that the DOI illegally granted the trust application for the land.
The plaintiffs claimed the DOI illegally took the land into trust for the tribe, because it was too soon after the tribe achieved federal recognition in 2007. A judge issued an order to halt all construction while the litigation was ongoing.
The Massachusetts court held for the plaintiffs and the tribe appealed to federal court. In February, a judge in the U.S. District Court in Boston held for the DOI and the tribe, holding that DOI had legally placed the land in trust.
Last week, the Littleton group filed a new lawsuit, this time arguing that DOI’s environmental impact statement is flawed. While the claim likely is false, the new suit is being seen as another delaying tactic by the residents, as resumption of construction will now be delayed for months or years as the new case winds its way through the courts.
The First Light Resort & Casino is planned as an integrated resort straddling the trust land and Mashpee reservation land, with 600 rooms spread across two hotel towers, an indoor/outdoor water park, and a 150,000-square-foot casino with 3,000 slots, 150 table games and 40 poker tables.
