Before the primary, Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed a deal to expand gaming at the Spirit Mountain Casino even as its owner, the Grand Ronde tribe, was running attack ads against him.
Gaming compacts timing raises questions of political gamesmanship
June 15, 2006
STEVE LAW Statesman Journal
STEVE LAW Statesman Journal
Before the primary, Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed a deal to expand gaming at the Spirit Mountain Casino even as its owner, the Grand Ronde tribe, was running attack ads against him.
In the midst of Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s bruising re-election campaign this spring, he quietly signed a new compact enabling the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde to expand its lucrative Spirit Mountain Casino west of Salem.
The revised compact, expanding the casino’s slot machines and gaming tables, potentially is worth $30 million per year in gambling profits. The deal came 10 months after the Grand Ronde helped buy television ads attacking the governor for authorizing a rival tribal casino in the Columbia River Gorge. The Warm Springs tribe’s proposed Cascade Locks casino would be closer to Portland, carving into Spirit Mountain’s clientele of day-trippers.
But if Kulongoski hoped to mollify a tribe bitter about his support for a rival casino, the Grand Ronde didn’t show its appreciation.
On March 30, two days after Kulongoski signed a compact allowing 33 percent more slot machines and table games at Spirit Mountain, the Grand Ronde paid $204,000 for TV ads attacking Kulongoski and supporting his main Democratic primary opponent, Jim Hill.
Those ads came eight days after the Grand Ronde launched similar ads for the Republican primary, attacking Kevin Mannix and supporting Ron Saxton.
The curious timing of the ads and the Spirit Mountain compact renewal raise intriguing questions for the governor and the Grand Ronde, which emerged last year as one of Oregon’s big-money players in politics.
Did the governor disregard the Grand Ronde’s ads against him and conscientiously try to help the tribe build its economic self-sufficiency?
Did the governor hope to forestall more negative ads that could mar his re-election drive?
Why was there no publicity about a compact bringing important side benefits, as well as increased traffic to Oregon’s top visitor attraction?
Was it fair — or wise — for the Grand Ronde to punish the state’s most powerful politician shortly after he enabled the tribe’s thriving casino to become even more profitable?
“It’s hard to figure out what’s politics and what’s not politics here,” said James Moore, a political scientist at Pacific University in Forest Grove.
It’s hard to tell whether the governor is just “being the executive and doing his job,” Moore said, or whether he’s “trying to cut deals so he can manipulate interest groups.”
Ulterior motives denied
Kulongoski laughs off any notion that he might have granted the Grand Ronde casino expansion to ward off more negative TV ads.
“I can assure you it was never a thought to get my election involved in whether I signed a compact with the Grand Ronde or not,” he said Tuesday during an interview in his office. “It just never came up.”
Kulongoski noted that the Grand Ronde is a sovereign nation and that the state must treat it diplomatically, as one government to another. The governor said he was under no illusion that he could get the tribe to back off its aggressive stance against the Cascade Locks casino because there’s so much economic self-interest at stake.
“I think they’re going to run this thing out until the very end,” he said.
Grand Ronde leaders said it’s coincidence that their ads against Kulongoski started shortly after he signed the new Spirit Mountain compact.
“We’d been dealing with this compact for 2 1/2 years,” said Justin Martin, a Grand Ronde tribal member and lobbyist.
The tribe had charted its ad campaign for the primary election well in advance and “already had these dates picked out,” said Cheryle Kennedy, the Grand Ronde tribal chairwoman.
Len Bergstein, a veteran lobbyist who represents the Warm Springs tribe, said the timing of the Grand Ronde’s ads for the Democratic primary is suspicious.
“It’s apparent to me that they made a decision to hold back on the anti-Kulongoski ads until they had the compact signed,” Bergstein said. “They obviously had those ads in the can. They waited until they had what they wanted.”
Feds open floodgates
The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act opened the floodgates to tribal gaming across the country. The act requires states that otherwise permit gambling to negotiate compacts with tribes that want to offer gaming, usually on reservation land.
The governor was obliged to negotiate with the tribe in good faith when it asked to redo its Spirit Mountain compact in March 2004, said David Reese, the governor’s legal counsel, who helped negotiate the compact. Negotiations began in July of that year, he said.
In the resulting deal, reached this spring, the Grand Ronde won the right to expand from the current 1,500 electronic slot machines at Spirit Mountain to as many as 2,000 machines and to expand from 60 Las Vegas-style gaming tables to 80 tables.
The tribe earns an estimated $90 million per year in gaming profits from Spirit Mountain. If the new machines and tables are equally successful, the expansion could net the Grand Ronde an additional $30 million per year.
Kulongoski was aware that the tribe was part of a coalition that ran TV ads against him in spring 2005, Reese said. But the governor wanted to treat it the same as the other Oregon tribes, Reese said, and he was in simultaneous talks to allow the Warm Springs to put as many as 2,000 slot machines at the Cascade Locks casino.
“We negotiated the right deal” with the Grand Ronde, he said. “We did it notwithstanding some very public statements that had been made” against the governor.
Public benefits
Kulongoski’s team also secured some important side benefits from the new Grand Ronde compact.
The tribe agreed to pay for improvements to Highway 18, a state highway that often is clogged with casino-bound traffic from Portland. Salem-area residents, who jam Highway 22 to get to Spirit Mountain, also will benefit. The tribe agreed to pay as much as $9.5 million toward the costs of a new interchange connecting highways 18 and 22.
Oregon’s poorer tribes also could reap benefits from the Grand Ronde compact.
The governor denied the Grand Ronde’s initial request to install more slot machines than allowed under the original deal, Reese said. Instead, the tribe won the right to exceed the 2,000-machine cap in joint ventures with other Oregon tribes that haven’t seen the same success with their casinos. Additional machines at Spirit Mountain would be operated on behalf of the other tribes, who would pay a cut to the Grand Ronde.
“It was very much our idea,” Reese said. “It steers some casino revenue to tribes that don’t have such advantageous locations.”
No publicity
Kulongoski could rightly claim that he was solving some congestion problems associated with Spirit Mountain and that he was aiding Oregon’s impoverished tribes.
But the governor’s office, which has issued a flurry of press releases since Kulongoski went into re-election mode last year, never made a public pronouncement about the deal.
“Nobody talked about it beforehand, nobody talked about it when it was going on and nobody talked about it when it was over,” said Roger Gray, a Democratic political consultant working for a rival private-sector casino proposed for land east of Portland.
Eco Northwest economist Bob Whelan, who has worked with all nine Oregon tribes on casino-feasibility studies and related consulting, was unaware of the revenue-sharing deal because compact details weren’t publicized.
Friends of the Columbia Gorge Conservation Director Michael Lang, a leading critic of the Cascade Locks casino who is working closely with the Grand Ronde to oppose it, was unaware that the Grand Ronde compact was renegotiated.
The governor’s media advisers viewed the compact as a routine matter, said Lonn Hoklin, Kulongoski’s chief spokesman.
“Renegotiations of compacts are pretty much a matter of course,” Hoklin said. “We weren’t consciously trying to cover it up.”
Siobhan Taylor, the public-affairs director for the Grand Ronde, said she was “a little baffled” that the governor’s office didn’t want publicity about the new compact.
“We drafted a press release that we wanted to say we were pleased to announce that the governor was prepared to sign a new compact,” Taylor said. “They called and said, ‘We don’t see a point in sending this out; it’s not a newsworthy event,'” she said.
The Grand Ronde decided not to issue a press release as a courtesy to the governor’s office, she said.
The relative silence about the major expansion at the casino could change this summer.
The tribe shut down Spirit Mountain’s bingo parlor to free up space. By early fall, casino marketing manager Greg Fritz said, 500 more slot machines should be on line.
slaw@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6615
