California Tribal Casino Compact Amendments: High Stakes Bring Heavy Spending

According to The Sacramento Bee, neither the Agua Caliente nor Abramoff reported any of their California lobbying expenditures, as required by state law. (Sacramento Bee, “Abramoff’s tarry brush: Tribes’ ties to lobbyist show need for change”, January 20, 2006. Editorials section, Page B6)

The Agua Calientes have said that they are not bound by California’s campaign finance rules. The state Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) found the tribe failed to disclose $8 million in political expenditures between 1998 and 2002. In December 2006, the California Supreme Court upheld the FPPC’s position, but the tribe is appealing the ruling.

HISTORY OF TRIBAL GAMING

Current laws governing tribal casinos arose out of a dispute between the state of California and a bingo hall owned by the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, whose reservation straddles Interstate 10, 100 miles east of Los Angeles. The dispute erupted more than 20 years ago when state regulators stepped in to close down Cabazon’s high-stakes bingo game. The tribe challenged the state’s jurisdiction, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the tribe that the state could not enforce its laws on the reservation without a specific treaty allowing it do to so.

One year later, the United States Congress established rules governing the tribes’ ability to offer gambling and the states’ needs to deal with the effects of tribal casinos. In 1988, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), creating the legal framework for the conduct of gambling on Indian lands. The IGRA requires states and tribes to establish “compacts” governing tribal gambling, which must be ratified by the Legislature.

What Congress did not foresee in 1988 was that tribal gaming would rapidly grow to the $24 billion industry it is today – with no end in sight to its growth. Congress also did not foresee that a small number of tribes would come to dominate the industry at the expense of the remaining, impoverished tribes, or that oversight of the burgeoning industry would be nonexistent.

Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College where he is the Chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program. He is coauthor of "The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City" and "Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and writes frequently for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and other publications The original of this was published by the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute and is republished with the permission of the author.