Seneca payment proposal rejected

Seneca payment proposal rejected

ALBANY — Gov. David A. Paterson has rejected an offer by the Seneca Nation to make casino revenue-sharing payments to three local host communities during a stalemate in which the state has accused the tribe of being late with more than $200 million in payments to the state.

“This cannot be done,” Peter Kiernan, Paterson’s lawyer, said to Seneca President Barry Snyder Sr. in a letter Thursday that was released Friday evening.

The governor has said the Seneca Nation broke the terms of a 2001 compact with the state in which the tribe must share each year 25 percent of slot machine proceeds to the state from its casinos at Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Salamanca. The state then shares a portion of that money with the localities.

But the Seneca Nation has not made payments for 2009 or 2010, the state claims, and the Paterson administration is trying to force an “expedited arbitration” clause of the compact to resolve the stalemate. The Senecas say the state has broken the compact’s terms by allowing new forms of gambling over the years into its “exclusivity” zone in Western New York.

The Senecas have floated a plan to just pay the local host communities if the state credits those payments against what it owes the state.

“The harm to the host communities caused by the Nation’s refusal to meet its obligations could be completely ameliorated if the Nation were to make the payments that it is obligated to make,” Kiernan wrote to Snyder.

Kiernan said that the state will make advance payments to localities for what they are owed if the Seneca Nation will repay those amounts within two weeks and the tribe agrees to immediate arbitration and it stipulates “as to the precise amount of exclusivity payments that it refuses to make.”