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EDITORIAL
Our view: Feds get it right about Indian casinos
Friday, March 28, 2008
The possibility of an Indian casino in Ohio — or two or more — has been part the background noise in gambling debates for several years. For some communities, it's been more than background noise. Lately, Monroe and, before that, Botkins (about an hour north of Dayton on Interstate 75) have put much effort into siting an Indian casino.
But more than local support is needed. In truth, the battle to get a casino actually has been, let's say, uphill (rather than a longshot), requiring approval from local, state and federal authorities.
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Now the Bush administration has made federal approval more unlikely that ever.
The new decision is hard to disagree with. It is, however, badly defended.
Specifically, the administration has decided that if a casino that an Indian tribe wants to open is hundreds of miles away from the tribe's reservation, that is a strong reason for rejecting it.
In southwest Ohio, the proposals have come from the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.
The U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs has rejected almost a dozen specific proposals for distant casinos and thrown cold water on almost that many more.
The bureau's rationale is this: putting jobs so far away from the reservation could tempt people to leave the reservation, undercutting its economy and well-being.
Hmmm. Maybe you have to be a specialist in Indian affairs to see merit in that thinking.
Some Indian forces have reasonably labeled the rationale "paternalistic." It certainly seems in conflict with the free-market ideology associated with a Republican administration. Other Americans move around in pursuit of economic opportunity. Why not Indians?
Whatever the rationale, the decision is for the better.
When Congress approved the general idea of Indian casinos in 1988, the goal was to spur Indian economic development, given all the avenues that the government had shut off over the decades.
The law certainly did that. By 2006, 230 tribes (out of 562) were running 387 casinos with revenues of $25.1 billion. (Non-Indian casinos had revenues totaling $32.4 billion.)
Some people will tell you that the Indian gaming phenomenon is far bigger than Congress anticipated. What's clear is that the idea was certainly not to place the interests of would-be casino developers above all others. There have always been restraints.
Let's look at Ohio. Even without the new Bush policy, a tribe would have a special problem here. Gov. Ted Strickland's office says he opposes the idea of Indian casinos.
But suppose the governor's position were different. The fact would remain that voters have voted down three different proposals for non-Indian casinos during the past two decades.
So how would it look for the Indians to get a casino, especially if the Indians are not even local?
Of course, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe is claiming to be a local tribe in the sense that it was here until it was expelled. A spokesman notes that the tribe's legal case is different from those rejected by the feds.
(However, Blake Watson, a law professor at the University of Dayton who used to work for the feds on these issues and still follows the subject, says the odds against an Indian casino in Ohio — always high — are now 1,000-to-1.)
So long as the law allowing for Indian casinos really does result in a significant number of Indian casinos — so long as it's not a dead letter — there's just something commonsensical about a regulation saying that a casino's location ought to have some connection with a tribe's residence for the last century. Let the big decisions about gambling in Ohio be made essentially by Ohioans.
