Tribe Agrees to Limit Planned Expansion of East Bay Casino

Plans to expand an East Bay card room located less than 10 miles from UC Berkeley halted last week when the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians agreed not to install 2,500 slot machines at Casino San Pablo, after facing heat from state legislators.

The tribe's plans to install slot machines and expand from 70,000 to 600,000 square feet will be abandoned. Instead, the tribe will install fewer than 1,000 gaming machines, including electronic bingo, for which they will not need state approval.

The machines will be housed in the existing card room, which will undergo some renovation but not change structurally, said tribal spokesperson Nick DeLuca. The card room will remain a strictly gaming facility, with no hotels or arcades, as were proposed in the tribe's original compact with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Lytton tribe did not expect the compact to be ratified by the state Legislature after observing its voting patterns, DeLuca said.

"Any reasonable person looking at the Legislature could see (the compact) wasn't going to pass," he said.

The compact most recently met opposition from Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, who asked legislators to kill the compact because the casino plan was too big for the community. Miller was one of the original supporters of the project.

Under the compact, the tribe offered $25 million to pay for improvements along Interstate 80 leading to the casino, and would have given 25 percent of the casino's profits to the state and local governments. Without slot machines, the state has no regulatory power over the facility and the tribe can avoid sharing revenue.

Alex Shulman, a spokesperson for competing card clubs and other East Bay groups opposed to Casino San Pablo, said he was pleased with the tribe's decision to drop plans for expanding the card room.

He said the urban casino would have had devastating effects on the economy and traffic in the East Bay, and aggravate social ills such as gambling, crime and domestic abuse.

Although the tribe said slot machines would have created 6,600 new jobs, an economic analysis of the project commissioned by East Bay card rooms last month found the casino would bring annual losses of almost $200 million to the Bay Area economy, including $54 million from Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

A separate study found the slot machines would have brought 34,000 more cars to the area daily and increase traffic on I-80 by 25 percent.

Even though the tribe has decided to halt plans for the slot machines, Shulman was still not satisfied with the new proposal.

"I think it's a good thing, I'm glad to see that they're recognizing the intense community opposition to the plan, but that opposition will not be appeased by having them installing pseudo-slot machines instead of real slot machines," he said.

Shulman urged the legislature to support a bill introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would require the Lytton tribe to undergo the same procedure for obtaining land that other tribes must undergo. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, will hold hearings on the bill this spring.

McCain aims to discover whether tribes across the nation have attempted to purchase property for casinos near major cities or highways, an action generally restricted to reservation land under federal law.

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