10
S moke S ignals
OCTOBER 1, 2015
'I can’t believe it has b
CASINO continued
from front page
west when he passed away in May
2004 at the age of 70.
“When he (Holmes) came back
he said we have to get in on this
while the door is open,” says Tribal
Elder and former Tribal Council
member Ed Larsen. “He said there
is a window of opportunity and we
have to take it.”
“The Poarch Creek had a very
good facility,” says Tribal member
and then-Spirit Mountain Develop-
ment Corp. General Manager Bruce
Thomas. “It was after the initial
visit with them that council decided
to take a closer look at gaming.”
Jim Willis, the Tribe’s general
manager at the time, says discus-
sions at the leadership level were
whether there would be gaming in
Grand Ronde ever. Willis, who now
lives in southern Oregon near Table
Rock, says the small contingent
of Tribal Council members who
visited Alabama came away with
a different view of Tribal gaming.
“That visit changed a lot of peo-
ple’s minds,” says Willis. “All they
(Poarch Band of Creek Indians)
had was high-stakes bingo and
they had used that to build a good
community. The folks from Grand
Ronde saw what was possible and
that had an effect on them.”
Thomas says there were many
economic development options on
the table for Tribal leadership to
consider. He said Tribal Council
looked at all of them and in par-
ticular they looked at what other
Tribes were doing.
“We had been looking at different
proposals and considering differ-
ent opportunities for economic
development when the gaming
proposal came up,” says Thomas.
“We realized it could be a home run.
Originally, we had been looking at
having a third party run the opera-
tion for us, but after considering our
Smoke Signals file photo
On Oct. 16, Spirit Mountain Casino will mark the 20th anniversary of its opening.
options in that regard we decided
to do it ourselves.”
Thomas was Spirit Mountain
Casino’s first general manager from
opening through Feb. 8, 2000. He
now works at Rolling Hills Casino
in Corning, Calif.
Thomas says the development
corporation — the Grand Ronde
Tribe’s economic development
arm — worked with the Shakopee
Mdewakanton Sioux Tribe in Prior
Lake, Minn., to establish Spirit
Mountain Casino. The Shakopees
own and operate Mystic Lake Ca-
sino southwest of Minneapolis and
St. Paul.
“I think Bruce Thomas was a key
player in that whole situation,”
says Tribal Council Chairman Reyn
Leno. “I think not having to hire a
management company to come in
and manage our casino for us added
to our success. We weren’t relying
on somebody else to tell us how to
run our casino. We, as a Tribe with
Tribal members and others, were
doing it on our own.”
Larsen agrees that Thomas was
one of the keys to Spirit Mountain
Casino’s early success.
“When we got going he took us
to the top,” says Larsen. “It was
exciting.”
Gaming compact signed
Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts,
who was governor from 1991-95,
signed a gaming compact with
Grand Ronde in 1993 and the
Tribal membership voted to pursue
gaming in 1994.
Roberts was Oregon’s 34th gov-
ernor and the first woman to be
Smoke Signals file photo
The 1993-94 Tribal Council – from left, Kathryn Harrison, Leon Tom, Mark Mercier, Ed Larsen, Merle Holmes, Candy
Robertson and Val Grout – stands on the future site of Spirit Mountain Casino.
elected to the office. She was born
in Corvallis and raised in Sheridan,
where she graduated from Sheri-
dan High School in 1955.
“She (Roberts) was open to the
idea,” says Larsen. “She came out
to the powwow to sign the compact.
It was quite an experience.”
“The process was new in Oregon
and it was relatively new nationally
because the Indian Gaming Act was
new to the country,” says Roberts
during a recent interview at Spirit
Mountain. “We had no experience
in Oregon with the kind of discus-
sions and negotiations that went on
in terms of size and the number of
machines. All of the technical part
of those negotiations we had never
done that before.
“It literally was a whole new pro-
cess for both the Tribal representa-
tives and the state people who were
doing the negotiations. We knew
the process had to be fair to the
Tribe. It had to be realistic. It had
to be economical so that they could
in fact make money at this process.”
Roberts says negotiating the
compact with Grand Ronde was at
times “tedious” and time-consum-
ing, but she said it was critical that
it was done correctly.
“It set the pattern for every other
Tribal negotiation that we did set-
ting up the next set of gaming oper-
ations,” says Roberts. “So this was
the blueprint, if you will, for what
we did with the rest of the state.”
Roberts says growing up in Sher-
idan made working with Grand
Ronde Tribal leadership interesting
and important.
“I had a few Tribal members who
actually went to school with me in
Sheridan,” says Roberts. “This felt
like home for me out here and the
fact that this was the first Tribe
was very special for me that I got
to do this one. It was a very positive
experience. It was not confronta-
tional and it was not just a legal