GUEST OPINION: Fight to protect the SouthCoast's interests continues
By Brian Kennedy
On June 9, Taunton voted for a tribal resort destination casino in the hope of jobs and economic development. This is perfectly understandable after years of stagnation and a continuous reduction in local aid from the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Promises of 1,000 construction jobs, 2,500 permanent jobs, $33 million in infrastructure improvements along with $1.5 million up front and $8 million per year sound good, but alone provide incomplete analysis. It’s now time for Taunton to look soberly at the agreement and find the best way forward.
The Inter-governmental Agreement Taunton has signed with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe presents serious long-term solvency issues for the city, as well as immense land use issues. We respect the vote of the city; our goal now is to avoid suffering the worst of a poorly constructed contract, and there are ways you can help. The effort is not anti-casino; it’s against an arrangement that, if left unaltered, will eventually do great harm to the city and surrounding communities.
Most important are the threats to Taunton’s long-term solvency. The IGA caps the property taxes of the tribe after the eleventh anniversary of their obtaining land in trust. In the intervening 10 years they do have a CPI increase of 3 percent, compared to the 2.5 percent the rest of Taunton will pay provided there is no Prop 2½ override. Second, the 8 million dollar minimum payment out of net slot revenues from the tribe is not indexed to CPI or inflation, meaning 30 or 50 years out, the tribe will still be paying the same amount to the city as they would be paying in the 11th year.
CPI and inflation will make the relative value of these fixed payments decrease to nothingness over time. Finally, the tribe has the option to annex adjacent lands without renegotiating the IGA, provided those lands are not used for gaming. It is unclear whether newly annexed land starts a new ten year property tax cycle or is grandfathered into the fixed payment on land in trust after the eleventh year. Eventually this creates a fiscal sinkhole for the city, and resultantly the state, as it is unreasonable to expect the tribe will not grow, nor will they negotiate away their favored tax status – they will simply expand their non-gaming revenue streams, streams the city cannot access.
Additional environmental concerns include water usage rights, to which the Tribe has absolute first priority. The land is situated over a crucial section of the Cotley and Taunton rivers, which run under the property and affect the water supply out to Berkley, Lakeville, Middleboro, the Bridgewaters and Brockton at minimum. The land the tribe proposes to put 12-15 story hotels is also directly in the flight path to the Taunton airport, with no mitigation in place for the airport and no Federal Aviation Administration study on the impacts.
The only way to address these concerns now is to go beyond our city officials to state legislators and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA held a scoping session on June 20 to hear environmental (defined as any concerns affecting the impacted community, not just landscape and wildlife) concerns. The concerns mentioned above were all registered, and additionally it was brought to the BIA’s attention by leaders of the Pokanoket tribe that the Mashpee tribe does not have proper historic ties to Taunton.
George Rizer for the Boston Globe
Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson, vice
chairman of the Pocasset Tribal Council, was among those who challenged Mashpee
historical claims to the proposed casino site.The Massachusett and Pocasset tribes — state-recognized tribes that have banded together to form the Affiliated Tribes — concurred. It was suggested by attorney Adam Bond that the BIA might be using our city as a test case to restore a power they lost in Carcieri v. Salazar (2009), which prevents tribes recognized by the federal government after 1934 from receiving land into trust.
The last vote left is the state compact with the governor. If the BIA cannot act to alleviate the concerns we have expressed, the only thing stopping Taunton from becoming ground zero for a fiscal and legal nightmare is instructing our state legislature to vote down the compact. No one wants to lose the opportunity for jobs, what we want is to ensure our city gets properly protected. The first thing you can do is write your legislators to inform them on these issues — and to vote down the state compact if they cannot be addressed. The BIA will also have continued chances for input.
StopTauntonCasino.com has additional info and sample letters to help you in contacting your legislators.
Ultimately, whether you look at, around, above, or below the proposed project there are a host of concerns that could not be covered in the two weeks from the release of the IGA to the June 9 vote.
Residents warned our councilors of many of these concerns, and six councilors voted for the IGA knowing they had no chance to amend it, per the city’s own legal consultant Mr. Cid Froelich. I reiterated this in my comments — in fact I said it was insane that our duly elected councilors could not amend the document before the referendum.
What bothers me most is that some city leaders repeated uncritically the viewpoint of one side — the side that dropped $300,000 on the city for the vote. We now see the result: A host of problems ranging from immediately identifiable long-term fiscal insolvency to potential FAA violations and water table disruption, to name only a few of the most pressing concerns. Unlike the concerns in the IGA, there is only one remedy for this leadership concern: The vote on Nov. 5, 2013. It’s on my calendar.
Brian Kennedy is a Taunton resident. He has been active in Preserve Taunton’s Future, studying the impacts of the proposed Taunton resort destination casino. He ran for School Committee in 2011.
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