PORT ANGELES — The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe has filed a letter of intent to construct an off-reservation gambling casino that tribal officials say may never be built.
It definitely would not be built on the Port Angeles waterfront, where the tribe owns former U.S. Coast Guard property on Ediz Hook, or where archaeologists have unearthed an ancestral tribal cemetery, according to the tribe’s letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles declined Tuesday to disclose the location of the site other than that it lies west of Port Angeles.
The letter of intent is a “placeholder” against pending federal legislation that would bar Native American tribes from operating gambling enterprises off their reservations, Charles said.
The Lower Elwha say they have other economic options for the land besides a casino.
A gaming complex would require lengthy and complex negotiations among the tribe, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the Washington State Gambling Commission.
Charles said it also would require the full support of the city of Port Angeles and Clallam County.
“We’d have to be in partnership with the city and county and the neighboring tribes,” she said, including the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe which owns 7 Cedars Casino in Blyn.
Five years in future
“We’re always searching for economics,” Charles added, saying that any enterprise — gambling or not — is at least five years in the future.
The former Coast Guard land on Ediz Hook once was proposed for a marina. Charles said the plan might be revived after the property is placed in tribal trust — meaning that though it lies outside the reservation, it has a reservation’s legal status.
As for Tse-whit-zen, the ancestral village that excavators found when they began building the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard, the site belongs to the state Department of Transportation.
The Lower Elwha withdrew support for the graving yard — a huge onshore dry dock to build pontoons to float the eastern half of the bridge — in December 2004.