The following article is from the March 2007 issue of
Governor Spitzer has signed a compact with the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe for a $600 million casino at Monticello Raceway in Sullivan County. While cheers are being heard from supporters, the deal is far from done.
As part of the project, federal officials required an "environmental assessment," which resulted in a finding of "no significant" environmental impact. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and several other groups filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan last week urging judges to require the federal government to complete a fuller environmental impact statement of the proposed project.
"Without that, we can't know the full impact of traffic congestion, deteriorating air quality and dangerous sprawl to the Catskills," said Richard Schraeder of the NRDC in a statement.
As the courts assess the case on environmental grounds, Governor Spitzer may have an even bigger and more immediate obstacle to overcome: U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne. The Mohawks are proposing to build their casino on land that is not part of any reservation, turning part of their property into an off-reservation casino. (The casino would be located 400 miles from the actual reservation and just 75 miles from New York City.) For this to happen, the Interior Department would have to agree to place 30 acres into trust for the Catskills casino. This is something it has done only three times before under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, and the last time was in 2000.
According to the New York Times [1], The Interior Department sent a letter to the Mohawks in December saying that while it had approved the existing environmental review of the project, Mr. Kempthorne holds negative views of off-reservation casinos. The secretary claims that the law, which passed in 1988, was never designed to permit casinos to be so far away from reservations. Off-reservation casinos have stoked controversy across the nation, and the current trend in Washington is to not approve them. In fact, there's been attempts to pass legislation that would prohibit them.
Capitol Confidential, the blog of the Albany Times Union, reported this week that Spitzer met briefly with Kempthorne in Washington, D.C. to make his case to approve the Catskills application.
From the perspective of supporters, the casino will bring enormous economic opportunities. It is expected to generate millions of dollars in revenue plus thousands of new jobs with New York State guaranteed a huge chunk. Mohawks signed a gambling compact that would provide the state government with up to 25 percent of the annual revenues from 3,500 slot machines at the casino, an amount estimated at more than $100 million a year.