A federal appeals court has dealt the Seneca Nation of Indians another blow in its bid to scrap a multimillion-dollar casino revenue-sharing agreement with the state of New York.
The tribe is now 0-3 after the court affirmed earlier rulings by an arbitration panel and a U.S. District Court judge that said the tribe lacked legal grounds for unilaterally halting the payments when its original compact with the state expired at the end of 2016.
That federally mandated agreement, first signed in 2002, committed the tribe to pay the state 25 percent of the annual slot machine win from its three casinos in Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Salamanca in exchange for a gaming monopoly over a large swath of western New York.
But with the statewide rise of commercial gaming, the competitive landscape was altered, as the Senecas see it, and the tribe halted the payments in 2009 to protest the licensing of racinos within its exclusivity zone. The payments resumed when the dispute was resolved with a compact extension running through 2023 that modified some of its provisions, but not the revenue-sharing, or so the state would later maintain when the Senecas halted the payments again in 2017 after a full-scale commercial casino opened in the Finger Lakes just beyond the eastern boundary of the exclusivity zone. The tribe justified the move by claiming the revenue-sharing ended with the expiration of the original compact.
The dispute went to arbitration and a split decision that the state was due the money. The Seneca sought the intervention of the U.S. Department of Interior, which oversees Indian affairs, but the department declined to get involved. The tribe appealed the arbitration ruling and lost again in a 2019 District Court decision that also found for the state.
On February 22, Judge Rosemary Pooler of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court’s decision.
“In this case, we are not asked to make pronouncements regarding the wisdom of the (arbitration) panel decision or of the (Interior) secretary’s view of the disputed term,” Pooler wrote. “The nation attempts to draw the court into these disputes and the competing policy interests of the nation and the state. However, the parties agreed to leave these difficult questions to the arbitrators.”
The state figures the missed payments currently amount to $435 million, about $150 million of which is earmarked for local governments surrounding the Senecas’ casinos, and Governor Andrew Cuomo called a press conference last Monday to call on the tribe to make good.
“The court decision was clear, and after years of delay, multiple appeals and multiple court losses, it is high time the Seneca Nation follows the law and pays what they owe,” he said.
The tribe had not indicated last week what its next move will be.
“The Seneca Nation is reviewing (the) decision and discussing all of our options at this time,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
