Nearly a year after the Jamul Indian Village and its partners Penn National Gaming opened the Hollywood Casino, committed opponents like the Jamul Action Committee still have not accepted that fact, and continue to deploy every obstacle against it.
Signs such as, “No casino in Jamul! Save our community!” and “97.5% say no casino!” dot the landscape.
Jamul is a relatively isolated community of manufactured homes, very expensive homes, mainly middle class.
The Jamul Village reservation is quite small, 6.3 acres, and the membership is small, 61 members. Most of them do not live in or near Jamul, a fact that opponents mention frequently. But, given that the reservation is as small as it is, and it is almost all taken up by the casino, where would they live.
The reservation is so small that Penn had to get creative when building the casino, some of which it put underground, including the six-level parking garage.
Marcia Spurgeon of the Jamul Action Committee recently took a reporter for the San Diego Reader on a drive through the community that ended up overlooking the casino.
She pointed to it with disgust and exclaimed, This is not like anything they told us they were going to build when we went to their meetings. This building is bigger than any Walmart in the United States.”
She insists that the casino looks wrong amidst hiking trails, mountains and grassy fields.
The Jamul Action Committee and the Jamul Planning Commission have between them filed more than 40 lawsuits against it.
Broadly speaking, they have three principal reasons against the casino, traffic safety, the impact
