| | |  | Last Updated: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 |  | | | Tribal Gambling Watched by Congress
- Monday, 6 Feb 2006
Just because online gambling has not been legalized in the US, it doesn't stop gambling fans from playing their favorite games, either online or at the many land-based tribal casinos across the country. In fact, the gambling industry has seen a rather large expansion in terms of tribal casinos. The gambling industry is setting up shop across the country, and locals are often kept in the dark about its arrival until it's too late. But now, some in Congress are targeting these gambling sites, which are operated by Indian tribes sometimes hundreds of miles from their tribal land in what has been dubbed "reservation shopping."
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held hearings Wednesday to hear from people like Al Alexanderson, who testified that he had been excluded from the decision to put a gambling site in his Washington state neighborhood. He called the local Bureau of Indian Affairs office to get the application, and they said, simply that he couldn't get the application. When he asked if he could in any way weigh in on the process, he said he was told, "No, you're not a participant."
That was an odd reaction, considering his land is next door to the eight-story casino in question, and the road in front of his house will see an extra 40,000 cars a day because of the gambling venues traffic. U.S. Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, has a bill before the Senate that would put a check on the practice of reservation shopping, which in many cases involves tribes being used by developers to further their own interests. "These gambling venues went from a very small revenue and small enterprise business," McCain said, "to a now approaching $20 billion a year business."
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