Plans for a $700 million casino resort sought by the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians advanced Friday with Department of Interior approval of federal trust status for a 160-acre site in Vallejo, on the north edge of the San Francisco Bay area, where the resort would be built.
The trust approval was signed in the closing days of the Biden presidency by Wizipan Garriott, the agency’s principal deputy assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, and disclosed to members of Congress. The decision becomes final early next week when it is listed in the Federal Register.
“This is a special day for the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians,” tribal Chairman Shawn Davis said. “For at least three decades, we have been trying to reclaim our community. This allows our people to have a home and to have economic development for us and for our neighbors.”
The approval comes just 10 days before the inauguration of Donald Trump as president for a second time. The first Trump administration rejected the tribe’s plan in 2019, but U.S. District Judge Amy Berman-Jackson ordered reconsideration on grounds the decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The Pomo resort site is located on the flank of Hunters Hill overlooking Vallejo, on the northeast side of the busy Interstate 80-State Route 37 interchange. Already at or near other corners of the interchange are the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom theme park and a major shopping center.
Other tribes have opposed the project, including the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, a federally recognized Patwin tribe that operates the Cache Creek casino resort west of Woodland, about 60 miles from Vallejo.
Yocha Dehe attorney Matthew Adams has said his clients would help the Scotts Valley Band develop its Pomo homelands near Clear Lake, about 90 miles north of Vallejo, but oppose the Vallejo project because it is within Patwin homelands and would “destroy Patwin cultural resources.”
Scotts Valley Band lawyer Patrick Bergin said litigation to block the project is possible but added that he is prepared for that contingency. Bergin said the tribe will proceed with other necessary steps, including an intergovernmental agreement with Vallejo and a gaming compact with the state.
Project developer Gregory Lee, a prominent Southern Nevada hotel-casino operator, hailed the Interior Department’s decision, adding, “We just feel very blessed to have an opportunity to help this tribe develop something that will be a tremendous asset for the tribe and for Vallejo.”
Lee already has numerous business holdings in Vallejo. His family has ties to the community going back more than a century.
Vallejo City Manager Andrew Murray said the city had sought a full environmental impact statement, which was not completed, but added the tribe “has expressed a desire to be a good neighbor.”
The Vallejo City Council recently voted to work with the tribe once the land was placed in trust. However, Gov. Gavin Newsom had urged the Interior Department not to approve the project, noting the Yocha Dehe claim that the Scotts Valley Band lacked a required historic connection to the Vallejo area.
But in her two decisions favoring the Scotts Valley Band, Judge Berman-Jackson cited evidence that connected the tribe to the Vallejo location. That included tribal travels in the 1800s to a Vallejo ranch for supplies and livestock herding on other nearby ranches by Pomo vaqueros.
Those vaqueros included Chief Augustine, who worked for Mariano Vallejo, the city of Vallejo’s namesake. In the pre-statehood 1830s and 1840s, Vallejo and his brother Salvador forced many Pomo Indians to work on their vast properties.
Augustine also herded cattle for Benjamin and Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone on land near Clear Lake — where several hundred Pomos were slaughtered by U.S. Cavalry troops and vigilantes in an 1850 attack known as the Bloody Island Massacre.
In his 2016 book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, author Benjamin Madley said the attack “may rank among the most lethal of all Native American massacres in the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents.”
