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If approved, the casino would be built on a 16-acre property in Cleveland County, employing an anticipated 3,000 people. Catawba rendering
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March 18-24, 2020
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EBCI will sue over decision BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER he Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians plans to sue the federal government in protest over a March 12 decision that will allow the Catawba Indian Nation to move forward with plans to build a casino in Kings Mountain. The Cherokee are claiming that the decision is flawed and that the government violated the law by not consulting the EBCI during completion of the associated Environmental Assessment. “The federal government has no right or authority to create a new reservation for the Catawba Nation across state lines, into Cherokee historical territory, just to build a casino,” said EBCI Principal Chief Richard Sneed. “This decision creates a dangerous precedent for all federally recognized tribes that empowers corrupt developers and their lobbyists to use politicians to determine what laws and precedents are followed and which ones are ignored. This decision cannot and will not stand.” The Catawba are a federally recognized Indian tribe with a reservation in Rock Hill, South Carolina, which is 34 miles southeast of the 16.57-acre property where the casino is to be built. It is unusual, even unheard of, for a tribe to receive permission to build a casino across state lines from its main reservation. However, said Catawba Chief Bill Harris, his tribe’s case is unusual as well. The Cherokee response is unwarranted. “It is unfortunate that the EBCI continues to perpetuate this narrative of tribe versus tribe,” he said. “The Catawba Nation has reached out many times to the leadership of EBCI to try to work together. In the past Chief Sneed has asserted that he isn’t against federally recognized tribes going into the gaming industry, but he wants all tribes to follow the DOI established regulations. In Catawba’s decision letter from the Department of Interior, it clearly outlines that Catawba followed the process from beginning to end, and
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the decision also demonstrates our cultural and historical ties to this area. Eastern Band has the right to react however they want to the decision from DOI, but we have done and will continue to do all we can for the betterment of our nation as well as extend the hand of friendship and cooperation to other Native nations.” About 30 percent of customers who visit Harrah’s casinos in Cherokee and Murphy live closer to the Kings Mountain site than to either of the EBCI establishments, so the Catawba casino would likely cause a negative economic impact in WNC. Meanwhile, Virginia is considering legislation to allow casinos at a limited number of cities in its jurisdiction, including Bristol. The EBCI has been lobbying for a version of the bill that would open the door for it to develop the casino in Bristol, but the bill that passed the legislature this month would likely favor a different developer instead. Like Kings Mountain, Bristol is geographically closer to about 30 percent of Harrah’s Cherokee customers, though there is likely some overlap between that population and the 30 percent who are closer to Kings Mountain.
A MULTI-PRONGED EFFORT The U.S. Department of the Interior issued its March 12 letter in response to a Sept. 17, 2018, application the tribe submitted requesting that the Kings Mountain site be taken into federal trust for gaming. However, the DOI application was not the only strategy the tribe had explored in its quest to gain approval for the casino project. In 2019, South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham introduced a bill that, if passed, would have allowed the DOI to take the land into trust without going through all the administrative steps typically required before coming to such a decision. North Carolina Senators Thom Tillis and Richard Burr signed on as co-sponsors to the bill, but Sneed made his opposition abundantly clear. So, too, did the N.C. Senate, when 38 of its 50 members signed a letter on May 16, 2019, opposing the bill as
a “last-ditch effort to game the system on a flawed application” and an “unprecedented overreach.” The state senators took issue with the bill’s intent to bypass the typical administrative process required to consider offreservation lands for gaming purposes,” saying that it would “skirt the formal input process that has worked for decades.” However, they also opposed the very concept of establishing a casino on the proposed site. Doing so would encroach on historically Cherokee territory and deal an economic blow to the western counties, where Harrah’s Cherokee Casino employs 5 percent of the workforce, the letter said. Additionally, at least 16 counties and municipalities in the western region passed resolutions opposing the bill. Perhaps that opposition had some impact, because the bill never made it out of committee. However, while the Senate was dragging its feet, the BIA was moving through its own process. This was the second time that the Catawba had submitted a BIA application in hopes of someday building a casino on the site. In 2013, the tribe applied to have the property transferred into federal trust under the mandatory acquisition provisions of the Catawba Indian Tribe of South Carolina Land Claims Settlement Act of 1993, but that didn’t work. On March 23, 2018, the Deputy Secretary of the Interior issued a memo stating that the Settlement Act’s mandatory acquisition provisions didn’t apply to the site, because the provisions resulted from negotiations between South Carolina and the tribe — they couldn’t be applied to a state that was not a party to the agreement, the deputy secretary ruled. But the Catawba didn’t give up. Less than two weeks later, the nation withdrew its mandatory application and on Sept. 17, 2018, submitted a discretionary application under departmental regulations guided by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a different framework from the Settlement Act. Generally, IGRA prohibits tribes from building casinos on lands
