The Narragansett Indian Tribe has gone to court to try to prevent the privately owned Twin River slot parlor in Lincoln in a November 2012 referendum from winning the distinction beating the tribe to the first casino in the state. The Indian tribe failed in its own attempts years ago.
Before heading home for the summer in June, state lawmakers approved legislation calling for the statewide vote that Twin River’s owners were seeking on their bid to add blackjack and other traditional casino games, currently banned in Rhode Island, to their gambling menu.
The legislation did not specify how much, if anything, the state would get in return for the award of this first, and potentially, only casino license. But the financial institutions that acquired Twin River, when it emerged from bankruptcy late last year, called the introduction of table games critical to the slot parlor’s ability to compete against the increasingly likely threat of competition from Massachusetts for the region’s gambling dollars.
In a lawsuit filed in Superior Court on Wednesday, the tribe contends the law calling for the referendum is both “unconstitutional and vague.”
The tribe hung its legal argument on the same requirement in the state Constitution that tripped up its first two efforts to get a Harrah’s-backed casino proposal for West Warwick on the state ballot. It says: “All lotteries shall be prohibited in the State except lotteries operated by the State,” which has been broadly interpreted to include most traditional games of chance at a casino.
In an earlier appeal to Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin for help, Narragansett Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas quoted the Rhode Island Supreme Court’s own words in an earlier case: “If … the question and legislation are void as unconstitutional, then members of the public will waste much money, time, effort and energy to familiarize themselves with the controversial issues that the proposed casino has raised.” (Kilmartin’s office declined to intervene.)
In its plea, the tribe said: “The voters of the State of Rhode Island are being asked to vote on … the expansion of gaming without any definition of what state operation of this expansion will consist of, what specific table games are going to be operated and what entity or personnel are going to operate them.”
“The statute is unconstitutional because the State must have the power to make decisions about all aspects of the functioning of any state casino, and this statute either provides no standard at all or allows a private entity unconstitutional control over certain aspects of the operation of the casino.”
Offered an opportunity Wednesday to respond, Twin River spokeswoman Patti Doyle said: “We’re not going to have much to say today.”
She said Twin River’s owners had just learned of the lawsuit, which “will take some time to review. That said, we are quite comfortable in the process in which we are engaged … as defined by the governor and General Assembly, and look forward to having the question put before the voters” in November 2012.
Twin River is currently home to about 4,750 electronic gambling machines, including virtual blackjack, placed at the former greyhound racetrack by the state Lottery under terms where the state gets to keep roughly 61 cents out of every dollar a gambler leaves behind.
The state expects $275.5 million from the video-slot play at Twin River this year alone, and another $28.7 from the smaller of the state’s two slot parlors, Newport Grand.
Twin River, especially, draws a significant number of its customers from Massachusetts. A survey released by the UMass Dartmouth Center for Policy Analysis in mid-September suggested that Massachusetts residents accounted for 56 percent of the visits by New Englanders to Twin River and Newport Grand during 2010 — up from 37 percent in 2006.
In a special report last month on the high likelihood of casino gambling and slots finally coming to Massachusetts, Moody’s Investors Service predicted: “Twin River could sustain a major blow.”
In their lawsuit, the Narragansetts, who saw their last Harrah’s-financed casino proposal rejected by voters in 2006, recounted their tribe’s decades of failed efforts “to gain economic self-sufficiency for its members” since passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
The tribe’s 1994 West Greenwich casino proposal was defeated by voters. Subsequent proposals got snagged by legal wrangling in the state and federal courts, and passage by Congress of the so-called “Chafee amendment.” It effectively barred the tribe from putting a gambling hall on its own settlement lands in South County without the same statewide and local approval that any other would-be casino-developer would require under state law.
The tribe’s last major push to open a Harrah’s-financed casino in West Warwick was reviewed, twice, by the R.I. Supreme Court: in 2004, at the behest of the governor and, in 2005, at the request of the House of Representatives. As the tribe recounts this history, the court essentially held both times that the proposed casino-referendum legislation was unconstitutional because the state would not have sufficient operational control over the gambling facility.
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