The following is the full text of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s May 18, 2005 proclamation regarding casinos in urbanized areas.
PROCLAMATION
BY THE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
WHEREAS, the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA) authorizes federally recognized Indian tribes to conduct class III gaming on Indian lands, as defined by IGRA, to the extent such games are permitted by state law, and pursuant to a gaming compact negotiated between a tribe and the State; and
WHEREAS, IGRA requires the State to negotiate in good faith for the conclusion of tribal-state gaming compacts with Indian tribes that request such negotiations when those tribes have eligible Indian lands located in the State; and
WHEREAS, in 1998, California voters approved Proposition 5, a statutory measure designed to allow for the operation of slot machine and house banked card gaming by California Indian tribes on Indian lands in accordance with federal law; and
WHEREAS, in 2000, California voters approved Proposition 1A, a measure that amended the California Constitution to authorize the Governor to negotiate and conclude compacts, subject to ratification by the Legislature, for the operation of slot machines, lottery games and banked and percentage card games by federally recognized Indian tribes on Indian lands in California in accordance with federal law; and
WHEREAS, during the campaigns to approve Propositions 5 and 1A, California voters were assured that approval of these measures would not result in tribal casinos being located in urban areas; and
WHEREAS, the constitutionality of tribal exclusivity over the forms of gaming authorized by Proposition 1A is premised upon the limitation of these activities to Indian lands; and
WHEREAS, there are over 100 federally recognized Indian tribes in California and many of those tribes already have Indian lands within the meaning of IGRA that are eligible for class III gaming; and
WHEREAS, California Government Code section 12012.25, subdivision (d), designates the Governor as the state official with authority to negotiate and execute tribal gaming compacts on behalf of the State; and
WHEREAS, California Government Code section 12012.25, subdivisions (c) and (e), provide that tribal-state gaming compacts negotiated by the Governor are subject to ratification by the Legislature; and
WHEREAS, in 1999, Governor Gray Davis concluded, and the Legislature ratified, compacts with 57 tribes, in anticipation of the voters’ approval of Proposition 1A; and
WHEREAS, since 1999, seven additional tribes have concluded compacts that have been ratified by the Legislature, seven tribes have amended the terms of their 1999 compacts, which amendments have been ratified by the Legislature, and one tribe with Indian lands in an urban area concluded a compact that was not ratified; and
WHEREAS, in the general election of 2004, two initiative measures, Propositions 68 and 70, that would have expanded gaming activities in urban areas were placed before the California voters; and
WHEREAS, Proposition 68 was defeated with 83.8 percent of the electorate voting against it and Proposition 70 was defeated with 76.3 percent of the electorate voting against it; and
WHEREAS, events demonstrate increasing public concern over the location and expansion of tribal gaming enterprises in California; and
WHEREAS, the State of California exercises jurisdiction over land within the territorial boundaries of the State, except to the extent such jurisdiction is expressly reserved by, or ceded to, the federal government or is preempted by operation of federal law; and
WHEREAS, IGRA generally prohibits Indian gaming on lands acquired by the federal government in trust for Indian tribes after October 17, 1988, the effective date of IGRA; and
WHEREAS, exceptions exist that authorize class III gaming on lands acquired in trust after October 17, 1988, (1) if the lands are taken into trust as part of (i) a settlement of a land claim, or (ii) the restoration of lands for an Indian tribe that is restored to federal recognition, (2) if the lands are taken into trust as part of the initial reservation of an Indian tribe acknowledged by the Secretary of Interior under the federal acknowledgement process, or (3) if the Secretary of Interior determines that a gaming establishment on lands acquired after October 17, 1988, would be in the best interest of the Indian tribe and its members, would not be detrimental to the surrounding community, and the Governor of the State in which the land is situated concurs in the Secretary’s determination that such land can be used for gaming (a Section 20 concurrence); and
WHEREAS, an increasing number of Indian tribes are seeking to take new land into trust for purposes of conducting class III gaming activities pursuant to the provisions of IGRA, often in urban areas; and
WHEREAS, it is in the best interests of all Californians that there be a clear statement of policy identifying the Governor’s positions with respect to Indian gaming on newly acquired trust land located in urban areas.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, Governor of the State of California, do hereby proclaim the following statements as my general policy on the specified matters related to tribal gaming:
1. I shall oppose proposals for the federal acquisition of lands within any urbanized area where the lands sought to be acquired in trust are to be used to conduct or facilitate gaming activities.
2. I shall decline to engage in negotiations for tribal-state gaming compacts where the Indian tribe does not have Indian lands eligible for class III gaming.
3. I shall consider requests for a gubernatorial concurrence under section 20(b)(1)(A) of IGRA, that would allow a tribe to conduct class III gaming on newly acquired land, only in cases where each of the following criteria is satisfied:
a) The land that is sought for class III gaming is not within any urbanized area.
b) The local jurisdiction in which the tribe’s proposed gaming project is located supports the project.
c) The tribe and the local jurisdiction demonstrate that the affected local community supports the project, such as by a local advisory vote.
d) The project substantially serves a clear, independent public policy, separate and apart from any increased economic benefit or financial contribution to the State, community, or the Indian tribe that may arise from gaming.
4. In order to ensure adherence to the foregoing policies, I will direct the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) to provide to the Attorney General and the following departments, boards, and commissions copies of every notice of a tribal application to have land taken into trust by the federal government:
a) The Department of Parks and Recreation
b) The Department of Water Resources
c) The Department of Fish and Game
d) The Native American Heritage Commission
e) The Department of Transportation
f) The California Highway Patrol
g) The Air Resources Board
h) The Department of Conservation
i) The appropriate regional office of the Regional Water Quality Control Board.
I will further direct the Resources Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, and Health and Human Services Agency to distribute a copy of the notice to any of their respective departments that may be able to provide input on a particular application. The departments referenced above will be directed to promptly review the notices and provide comments to the Legal Affairs Secretary for a determination as to whether any comment on an application to have land taken into trust should be provided to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The boards and commissions listed above will be invited to provide comments on said notices to the Legal Affairs Secretary.
5. I shall support legislative ratification and Department of Interior approval of each compact or amended compact negotiated by my administration, including the one compact for a casino in an urban area that is not yet ratified by the Legislature.
6. For purpose of this Proclamation, “urbanized area” means the definition of that term as defined in Public Resources Code section 21071, subdivision (a). A list of the cities meeting this definition as of the date of this Proclamation is attached hereto.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Great Seal of the State of California to be affixed this 18th day of May, 2005.
__________________________________
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER
Governor of California
ATTEST:
___________________________________
BRUCE McPHERSON
Secretary of State
I just picked up three awards at last night’s Society of Professional Journalists Inland Southern California Chapter banquet. Unlike how it normally works, where the work you’re really proud of gets skipped in favor of totally random stuff – the year I went to Bosnia, the Virginia Press Association award I won was for my play reviews instead – one of my awards was actually for something that I really sweat over last year, and that pretty much defined my first year writing for the Hesperia Star.
Third place, Continuing Coverage, “casino series.� My editor, Peter Day, and I shared an award for our coverage of the proposed Timbisha Shoshone casino project in Hesperia. This is especially gratifying, since there was a lot of pressure, political and otherwise, to stop covering this story, and let the loose ends of the proposal remain a secret from the public. It took approximately four months to put together the first major article I wrote on this, picking up from Peter’s coverage of the proposal and initial vote by the public.
Judge’s comments: “Great reporting on a hot-topic story. Shady past of developer is well-brought out, as is dysfunction within tribe.�
I can’t remember which five stories we submitted, but here is sampling of our casino coverage online:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Third place, Best Crime/Law Enforcement Story, “Citizens On Patrol.� This is a good example of a “huh?� award.
The COP program lets ordinary volunteers stretch the manpower of the Hesperia station of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department further, by picking up the slack and doing work like directing traffic around accident scenes, driving out to check on the homes of vacationing residents and calling shut-ins to make sure they’re OK.
I basically just covered the training process for the new class. But I don’t feel like this was one of my best efforts, or was likely to have been a better law enforcement story than most of those submitted. It all just depends on getting the right judges in the right mood, I guess.
Judge’s comments: “Nice slice of life cop activity seldom written about.�
The original story is online here.
First place, Best Cultural/Diversity Story, “Church serves gay community, performs same sex ‘holy unions.’� This was a story I did at the end of my first month at the Star, and the silence in response to writing it was deafening; there are many relatively conservative residents in Hesperia, and I was surprised to have heard from neither people offended by what the church was doing, nor people supporting it. This is another one I worked hard on to do just right, and it’s gratifying to finally hear it paid off.
Judge’s comments: “This story tackles a sensitive topic of gays and religion head-on with clarity and grace.�
The original story can be found online.
More information about the awards is available online at the SPJ site.
Anyway, this is a long way to go to say “woo hoo!�
There should be an award for “best metaphor.” Tonight, I said that the chocolate and peanut butter of Ontario and Hesperia politics have mixed before.
Fake being impressed, please.
In other news, I may have (really) developed arthritis at age 36. I may be asking you to suffocate me with a pillow if the pain in my joints doesn’t ease. My hand resembles a flipper in the morning until I choke down sufficient Advil. Tests are being run by the GP here …
Here’s another example of the types of stories I like to write: There’s nothing particularly newsworthy about all this, but it’s a look into a vanishing way of life and the subjects are real charmers. I also have been criticized for loving quotes too much, but in a story like this, the quotes are the story: The love the Klines have for each other, their rural Virginia background, even their age can all be found in the way they speak. Originally published in the Potomac News in fall 1997.
Perched above Va. 28 in Manassas Park, Kline’s Freeze is surrounded by bright, newly built shopping centers and chain restaurants. But the modest restaurant looks much as it did 32 years ago, when the Kline family bought it.
The lines of customers who wait outside at all hours of the day prove that the Klines must be doing something right.
It doesn’t hurt that Paul and June Kline love what they do.
“He loves to eat ice cream!” June said, preparing lunch orders on a recent Friday. “He grew up on a dairy, eating ice cream every Sunday, cranking it up. He can eat it every day of the year, all year ’round and never get tired of it.”
When Paul, who delivered milk for a local dairy, came home and announced the owner of the Tastee Freeze was looking to sell, June was all for it.
“Oh, that was simple,” she said. “He’d been looking at dairy farms. And I said, ‘honey, this is something we can handle.'”
Like all small businesses, this one had a few growing pains.
“It wasn’t a profit to begin with,” Paul, 75, said. The previous owner “only had the two ice cream machines. But you’re not going to sell that much ice cream when there’s snow on the ground.”
So the Klines added food griddles to the restaurant in January 1967.
“In the spring, when we had the food machines and the warmer weather. That’s when we started making a profit,” Paul said.
“Our foot-long hot dog has been our best food seller for years now,” June said, lifting the lid on the hot dog grill. “We make the homemade chili to put on it. We make everything to order. We don’t precook anything.”
There have been other changes, of course, in the years since the couple bought the restaurant. Cones that cost 10 cents, 20 cents and 30 cents when Kline’s opened now cost $1.10, $1.50 and $2.10.
“That just shows you how inflation is now,” Paul said, looking at a menu taped to the wall. “Now we can dip them in chocolate, you know? Man, we sell a mess of those. It’s just crazy.”
The Klines’ success, to hear them tell it, was almost guaranteed.
“This was the only thing between here and Centreville Road,” June, 68, said. “So the fire department would have turkey shoots and all right out back. They’d even have parades right down 28. You wouldn’t imagine that today.”
The fast-food chains that are now within walking distance haven’t hurt business one bit, Paul said.
“They’ll get their drinks somewhere else and come in here for their food and their ice cream. So in some ways, it’s helped,” he said.
Paul Kline walked into the kitchen area of the restaurant, with employees dodging him as they carried hot dogs, drinks and ice cream around him.
“I’d like to tell you exactly why. I’ve got the [soft] serve ice cream right here. We’ve got all the flavored toppings,” he gestured. “You just can’t get it anywhere else. There used to be Tastee Freezes and Dairy Queens everywhere. You’d think we’d have competition, but we don’t.”
The location has always been a good one.
“This has been a residential area for a long time now,” June said. “Now we get customers from Fairfax County.”
“We get customers from all over,” Paul said. “Woodbridge, Dumfries.”
“Right,” his wife continued. “Our problem is that we shut down at night while the customers are still coming.”
Kline’s Freeze is supposed to shut its doors at 8 p.m., but it rarely works that way on weekends.
“We’ll stay open later than that,” Paul said. “As long as they’ll keep coming in, we’ll stay open.”
He looked over his shoulder at the lunch crowd lining up at the windows.
“Yeah, they’re coming in nice.”
Kline’s Freeze was so successful, the Klines opened a second restaurant, a drive-in on Linton Hall Road, near the Manassas airport.
“We built in ’69,” Paul said.
“It was November,” his wife added.
He turned to her slightly.
“Do you know the exact date?”
“Of course. Veterans Day, November 11, 1969. Now, when we built it, we didn’t know that IBM was going to move in,” she said. “We moved in right at the same time, and so we made a profit right from day one.”
At the time, some people didn’t think it was such a wise decision.
“Oh, we lived just up the road. It was farmland there all around there,” Paul said. “And I’ll tell you something else. … Some businessmen in Manassas found out that I was going to build two-three miles out of Manassas, and they said ‘shucks, man, you’ll starve! No one will want to come out that far!’ And I said, ‘fine, we’ll starve.’
“But that took off like a rocket. We get a lot of traffic out there.”
Although the drive-in — now run by one of the couple’s sons — emphasizes hot food, both restaurants still are grounded in one thing: ice cream.
Paul walked over to the bank of ice cream machines.
“This here is strawberry. We’ve got strawberry, chocolate and vanilla.”
He rested his hands on the ice cream taps. “You pull here and you get chocolate, here you get vanilla and chocolate swirled together. And here you get strawberry and vanilla swirled together. People like that.”
They also like his milkshakes. They’re something of a novelty nowadays, as they’re made with real milk. And other real ingredients.
“You see that there?” He pointed, lifting up the lids on a series of tins. “That’s what makes this good. That’s frozen strawberries. And this here’s strawberry ice cream.” He handed over the milkshake, smiling like a proud father. “It’s got it, hasn’t it? Yes, sir. You add the strawberries to it, and that tells the story. … I got all these flavors here: strawberry, butterscotch, cherry, that’s pineapple, chocolate. And we can do malts.”
The Klines have been running their business since Lyndon Baines Johnson was president, and are working harder most days than many people 10 years younger do. But Paul is in no hurry to retire.
“I guess I will eventually,” he said. “I’m 75. But I won’t put no time on it. I don’t know when it’ll be.”
Neither Kline has any regrets about having spent more than 30 years selling ice cream to the public.
“Was I ever sorry?” June asked, slipping hot dogs into buns. “No, no!”
“Never for a minute have I been sorry,” Paul said.
“The business has been good to us,” June said, “All our kids have been able to work with us.”
The members of the expansive Kline family tree — including seven children and 18 grandchildren — aren’t the only employees of Kline’s Freeze, although it sometimes seems that way.
“They happen to all be my kin today,” Paul said. “That’s my daughter Lorraine in there. And this here’s her daughter, and she …”
“She’s a great niece,” June interjected.
“Is that how it works? Well, they’re all great,” Paul laughed. He glanced over at the lines forming across the counter. “Now, you can see out here the traffic we get. It’s only noon here.
“We get by,” he said, with quiet understatement. “Sometimes we have six people in here, with a person on the grill,” Paul said, watching his family bustling around the business that bears his name, serving the customers who line up, come rain, or come shine for his food. ‘And we put ’em out. We put ’em out.”
This is one of three Potomac News reviews that won me a first place Virginia Press Association award in the Critical Writing category for medium-size newspapers in January 1998.
In its day, “Hair” was the musical that caused trouble. It insulted hallowed institutions, celebrated rebellion, featured nude actors — briefly — and rocked and rolled on Broadway.
Twenty-nine years later, “Hair” has returned to Washington, D.C., in a new production at the Studio Theatre.
The production is full of energy, sex-appeal and passion. But times have passed it by, and the anti-Vietnam, pro-hippie musical feels a little hollow in the 1990s.
For those of us who missed it the first time around — or weren’t even born — the legendary musical is about a group of drop-outs and protesters living on the streets, or in communal “pads.” But the spectre of Vietnam hovers over them, with one character finally getting drafted for the war.
The Studio production certainly captures the spirit of the times. The first act, the “love” portion of this “tribal love musical,” is enough to steam up anyone’s glasses. The cast is sexy, to put it mildly, and their gyrations and flirtations crank the heat up in the Studio Theatre’s Secondstage.
The musical, unfortunately, is structured in such a way that the first act, while fun, doesn’t have much drama to it. That’s all saved for the second act, where Claude (the excellent Jason Gilbert) wrestles with what to do about being drafted. His friends urge him to burn his draft card, and while he’s scared of death — hauntingly portrayed in two battle scenes — he also feels an uncool pull of patriotism.
Being a hippie for Claude is a lifestyle choice, not a political one, and although he’s the not the only one of his “tribe” of hippie drop-outs and protesters who feels that way, he’s the only one willing to even come close to admitting it.
More than two decades after the fall of Saigon, Gilbert and the cast of “Hair” make the idea of death in Southeast Asia, for a cause that was murky at best, terrifying.
The cast is uniformly excellent, with standout acting performances by Gilbert as Claude, Nell Mooney as the pregnant Jeanie, Chris Noll who plays Woof as though the character were on loan from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and Larry Baldine as the self-centered Berger. The cast are no slouches in the musical department, either, with Rebecca Davis, Tracie Nicole Thoms and Kathleen Maguire blowing the roof off the theater with their vocal chops.
Not content with just the story, songs and costuming, even the Studio production’s staging harkens back to the 1960s. Audience members shift rooms with the players several times, and the cast is very “hands-on” with the audience. (In 19 months of reviewing plays for the Potomac News, “Hair” on Sunday was the first time an actress has kissed me during a performance.) The approach prompted a few nervous giggles from audience members at first, especially those sitting on the floor with cast members, but ultimately it works.
Seeing “Hair” may be a revelation for those too young to know it except from its soundtrack. Who knew that “Let The Sun Shine In” is actually a haunting, even eerie sorrowful song? (Well, my parents did, but who listens to their parents talk about the 1960s?)
This isn’t to say the Studio production is total flashback to the 1960s: Most of the men’s hair styles are hardly the flowing locks celebrated in the title song, and K’dara Korin (who plays Hud) sports a wildly anachronistic nipple ring. And there’s at least one bad, bad wig worn by an ensemble member.
And although the performance itself works as a whole, the production comes off as little more than a time capsule, with the same relevancy as the animatronic robots in the Hall of Presidents in Disney World. The sting of “Hair” is lessened, to put it mildly, when we have a president who has smoked marijuana and protested the Vietnam War.
The musical would been more of a rebellion during the Reagan-Bush years — when ’60s nostalgia was still hip, incidentally — or, if Studio had really wanted to ruffle some feathers, during the Persian Gulf War.
For all the love, lust, passion and pain in this production, its timing means it comes off feeling a little too … safe.
Which is a total bummer, man.
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