Denham shouldn’t support bill to limit Madera casino project

To Rep. Jeff Denham:

The Madera County Board of Supervisors must express our deep dismay and disappointment with the substance of the draft HR 5079 but also your participation in this wildly unfair and misdirected attempt at lawmaking. If this legislation is inconceivably passed into law, it will accomplish absolutely nothing constructive – except putting at risk over 12 years of cooperation between our community and the North Fork Rancheria Tribe.

We hope you will seriously reconsider your sponsorship of HR 5079, preferably withdrawing it in advance of any hearing.

Madera County is repeatedly on record as supporting the North Fork gaming project, joining every local jurisdiction, business chamber and employment and economic development agency in having either a formal position of support or a standing partnership agreement with the tribe concerning its project.

Support for the project stems from the enormous positive employment and economic benefits it will bring our region as well as the careful, respectful, collaborative approach taken by the tribe to engage the community, mitigate any potential impacts, and contribute generously through local agreements – benefits you personally called out over a decade ago during the Senate GO Committee Hearing in Madera:

You said on May 19, 2005: “We’ve seen North Fork come to the table early, work with local government and come up with mitigating some of the challenges that we see here in the valley, everything from unemployment to some of the need for transportation funding and for the law enforcement funding. So I believe this is unprecedented.”

For more than 12 years the North Fork Rancheria has diligently pursued its gaming project as specifically allowed by federal law and prevailed through every local, state and federal administrative review and approval. For the past four years, the tribe has overcome every legal challenge put forth by wealthy gaming tribes and their investors intended to delay or diminish the project. Now, at the 11th hour, this unprecedented and cynical legislative maneuver seeks to undo all this work and merely add to the already enormous costs incurred by the tribe and community.

This last-minute attempt to change the rules that have applied to other California tribes for more than 20 years will not remove the tribe’s land in Madera from being in trust nor will it remove the tribe’s right to conduct gaming on that land. By denying the North Fork Rancheria the right to operate Class III gaming, HR 5079 will simply force the tribe to operate Class II gaming. That change kills jobs and economic opportunities by preventing the investment that accompanies the “highest and best” economic use of the land, jeopardizes local agreements and non-gaming tribe payments as well as worker and customer protections required by secretarial procedures, undermines state participation in the regulation of gaming, retroactively penalizes a tribe and community that followed all existing rules, unjustly removes a reasonable, fair legal remedy for bad-faith dealings and upends 30 years of established federal Indian gaming law to the detriment of tribes across the nation.

Madera County has seen the enormous benefits tribal-government gaming can bring to a community when done right. Sadly, we’ve also experienced the economic costs of lost jobs and revenues caused by out-of-control greed and politics. We vastly prefer the former scenario, as represented by the North Fork project. Our region desperately needs new jobs and development and this project offers financial rewards for both the county and state.

Delay and obstruction of this project have already cost our region thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost benefits. This must end! We look forward to the jobs and economic development the North Fork Project will bring to the tribe and our county and formally ask that you withdraw your support for HR 5079 and do everything possible to prevent its passage.

This story was originally published May 14, 2016 at 6:30 PM with the headline "Denham shouldn’t support bill to limit Madera casino project."