MOHEGANS DROP OPTION ON WISCONSIN CASINO SITE

Mohegans Drop Option On Wisconsin Casino Site

While the Mohegans continue to support a Wisconsin tribe's efforts to have land taken into trust for an off-reservation casino project, they are no longer paying to maintain an option on the property, according to the Mohegan Tribal Council's vice chairwoman.

In regard to the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin's proposed development, “our spending is minimal,” Lynn Malerba said Tuesday.

The Mohegans had been making quarterly payments on an option on the Dairyland Greyhound Park in Kenosha, which the Menominees - with the Mohegans help - hope to turn into a $1 billion entertainment center and casino. The Mohegans would develop the project and, under a 2004 agreement, manage the casino for the first seven years of its existence in exchange for 13.4 percent of net revenues.

In 2007, the Mohegans bought out another partner, Kenosha businessman Dennis Troha, whose Kenesah Gaming Development LLC had obtained an option to buy the greyhound park. Starting in July 2006, the option, renewable for three months at a time, cost $400,000 a year, according to a Kenesah financial statement.

Malerba said the Mohegans have made no option payments in 2009, relinquishing that responsibility to the Menominees. Eric Olson, director of the Kenosha casino project, said Tuesday the Menominees' option remains in effect. “We're hoping that things come through and that we have a casino,” he said.

The Menominees are also on their own in pursuing a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior, whose previous secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, decided Jan. 7, days before leaving office, that he would not take the Kenosha land into trust for the Menominees.

On May 15, the Wisconsin tribe filed suit against the Interior Department and its new secretary, Kenneth Salazar, asking that Kempthorne's decision be overturned. The suit takes issue with a department rule requiring the department to decide whether to take land into trust before deciding whether the land is suitable for gaming, and with a department memorandum discouraging approvalof casinos located beyond a “commutable distance” from a tribe's reservation.

The Menominee reservation in northeastern Wisconsin is about 200 miles from Kenosha.

”We're not involved in the lawsuit,” Malerba said. “We believe in (the Menominees') sovereignty, as they believe in ours. Our role is to help develop the project, manage it and then back away. For us to get involved in an intergovernmental issue would be overstepping our bounds.”

Tribal officials have put the Mohegans' investment in the Kenosha project at more than $12 million, a figure Malerba said “is in the ballpark.” She said it's less than the Forest County Potawatomi, a Wisconsin tribe that operates a casino in Wabeno, has spent fighting the Kenosha project.

"Regional"
- 5/27/2009 12:56:19 PM

EDITORIAL FOOTNOTE: Another bad deal by this Mohegan Tribal Council who voted for this project, at the very least another $12 million gone. How much are we short on our Mohegan Tribal Government Budget for Fiscal year 2009? Could it be as much as was lost on the Wisconsin project? These people need to go. What do you think?