Fall River: Don't gamble with community's future

Don't gamble with community's future

Mayor Flanagan, I appreciate your vision for a
well-employed, well-funded Fall River. But I believe
you have been ill-advised on certain matters regarding
the issue of placing land into trust on behalf of the
Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

If I understand correctly, if Ken Salazar, of the
Department of the Interior, were to “expeditiously”
approve the Mashpees application for land into trust
in Fall River, it would be in violation of at least
two Supreme Court decisions: the Hawaiian decision
and the 2010 Oneida decision.

Also, although your desire to maintain the “no
landfill” mandate on the 300 acres is applaudable,
your threat to sue them if they violate this mandate
is laughable. Would you seriously attempt to take on
a sovereign tribe over a land use dispute? Let’s think
of sovereign land like a foreign embassy — what they do
is not governed by the rules and regulations of the host
country, but by what their own homeland ordains, with
few exceptions. You willprobably find that that pretty
much means they can do what they want with it, landfill
and all, if they wanted to. EPA regulations and
protections? Out the window. They only apply to federal
soil, not sovereign.

I beg you to research how the Senaca Nation has treated
Niagra Falls, N.Y. Please do not allow this to happen here.

You will need more than a mere reverter clause to protect
Fall River. You need to simply not do business with so-called
investors who have lied in the quite recent past. I am
speaking of the agreement between the Mashpee Wampanoags
and the town of Middleboro. (And even that land was too far
away to meet the land-into-trust requirements.) What I say
is a lie is their signed agreement to establish a casino
in Middleboro and bring in the money. They have proved
themselves indecisive and untrustworthy because they
obviously backed out and have failed to uphold their
end of the deal.

These investors do not care one cent about our city,
their potential host. They didn’t (and don’t) care about
Middleboro. We cannot afford to ignore that.

So I am asking you to immediately re-offer the land to the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for the BioPark.
We cannot have both and we may find ourselves with neither.
It is political suicide to pursue a venture with untrustworthy
investors. Don’t gamble with our future. It is not right.

Rebecca S. O’Neill
Fall River