The San Diego County Board of Supervisors May 5 lifted the county’s longstanding blanket opposition to any tribal applications to put land into trust.
There are 18 Indian tribes in the county, and most of them have casinos. That is the highest concentration of Indian casinos in the country. The policy was put into place about the time that the state’s voters amended the state constitution to allow Las Vegas-style casinos on tribal land.
Rincon Tribal Chairman Bo Mazzetti, whose tribe owns Harrah’s Southern California Resort, was pleased with the vote: “If you look at what the original policy was dealing with, it was supposed to be not buying land for the purpose of building casinos.” He added, “Well, tribes aren’t building casinos anymore, and that’s what is dumbfounding; why would they oppose us just buying back our own land?”
The charge to change this policy was led by Supervisor Jim Desmond, who said the County’s policy was disrespectful to tribes. Mazzetti was more blunt: “It’s time to get rid of this outright racist law. Let’s do what’s right!”
Before the vote Desmond declared, “All we are doing is taking away the blanket no that has been there a couple of decades. It’s quite unfair. We don’t do that with any other entity. We will just remove the blanket now and react to future applications on a case by case basis.”
The panel also voted to end a longstanding policy that gave more scrutiny to requests for liquor licenses for tribal casinos than it did to non-tribal applications.
According to Mazzetti, it can take as long as a dozen years to shepherd a fee to trust land application through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “After 170 years, some of us are fortunate to have the economic ability to buy back some of our land,” he said.
