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The Roseburg News Review May 5, 2006
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon tribe hopes to build an off-reservation casino in the Ontario area of Eastern Oregon, perhaps along Interstate 84.Tribal and other officials said Thursday that few details were available.
It is Oregon’s second active application for an off-reservation casino.
Burns Paiute Tribal Chairman Dean Adams and a Bureau of Indian Affairs spokeswoman in Washington confirmed that the tribe headquartered in the Eastern Oregon town of Burns has made a formal application to the BIA.
The BIA spokeswoman, Nedra Darling, said few details about the proposal could be released immediately.
Adams said the tribe, Oregon’s smallest, soon would reveal a description and location for the proposed project.
Darling said applications for tribal casinos typically consist of a resolution from the tribal council, a description of the site of the proposed casino, and a checklist of steps to be taken in the application process.
Lonn Hocklin, spokesman for Gov. Ted Kulongoski, said the governor had gotten a heads-up from the tribe within the past year that it would submit an application, but nothing beyond that.
“That’s as much as we know about it,” Hocklin said.
Local officials told the Argus Observer newspaper in Ontario that the casino idea is not new.
“We’ve known about that for three years,” Russ Hursh, former chair of the Malheur County Commission, told the Argus Observer last month. He said the tribe also wants a distribution center for its art and jewelry and that the venture would bring business to Ontario.
Casino proposals need state and federal approval.
An Oregon policy of one casino per tribe would require the Burns Paiute Tribe to close its Old Camp Casino on the edge of Burns in Harney County and open another one.
The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs have agreed to close the casino on their reservation in Central Oregon to get permission to open a casino at Cascade Locks in the Columbia Gorge. However, that project is being contested.
All nine of the state’s recognized tribes or tribal confederations have casinos but not all are on tribal land.
The three non-reservation tribes are the Klamath Tribes, the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua and the Confederated Tribes of Coos and Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw tribes.
Under federal tribal gaming regulations only land owned by tribes prior to 1988 qualified for casino development — but there were exceptions for tribes that recently took land into trust because of cultural ties.
Legislation sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and approved March 29 by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee would eliminate off-reservation gambling for tribes with their own reservation land. But the bill states that any applications filed before April 15 — two weeks after the committee meeting — would be grandfathered into current law.
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