Mashpee tribe leader warns of job, service cuts

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Mashpee tribe leader warns of job, service cuts

By Tanner Stening
Posted Dec 6, 2018

MASHPEE — Just days after the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s financial backer announced a $440 million loss associated with its investment in the tribe’s planned casino, Tribal Chairman Cedric Cromwell said his government is on the verge of another major rollback.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Cromwell warned that the tribe will have to close its language school, slash programs and lay off more employees next year if legislation aimed at ending an ongoing legal challenge to the tribe’s reservation, introduced earlier this spring, doesn’t pass.

U.S. Rep William Keating, D-Mass., introduced the bill in the House, and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., submitted the bill in the Senate.

“Unless Congress enacts legislation now to prevent the Department of the Interior from disestablishing our reservation, in 2019 we will have to close programs, shutter our school, lay off our governmental employees, and witness the dissolution of all that we have achieved since our federal recognition was restored in 2007,” Cromwell said in the statement.

Genting Malaysia Berhad announced the loss as reflected in its third quarter report on Nov. 30, but in a statement it said it would continue supporting Keating’s legislation. The company also noted that the loss can be reversed “when the promissory notes are assessed to be recoverable.”

“The impairment loss was due to the uncertainty of recovery of the Group’s investment following the (U.S. government’s) decision concluding that the tribe did not satisfy the conditions under the Indian (Reorganization) Act that allow(s) (it) to have the land in trust for an integrated gaming resort development,” the statement says, referring to a Sept. 7 decision by the Department of the Interior that overturned an Obama-era determination declaring the tribe’s eligibility to have its 321 acres of land taken into trust under the 1934 federal statute.

In 2015, the Interior Department had found the tribe qualified to have the land in Mashpee and Taunton taken into trust on its behalf. The tribe has plans to build a $1 billion casino on the land in Taunton but neighbors of the development successfully sued to block it.

In its September decision, the Interior Department responded to a 2016 federal court decision, agreeing that the Secretary of the Interior did not have the authority to take the land into trust because the tribe was not under federal jurisdiction at the time of the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 and therefore did not qualify under a definition of “Indian” used by agency officials.

“It is almost impossible to describe the despair the federal government’s continued inaction has brought to our people,” Cromwell said.

Genting’s third-quarter report comes amid longstanding concerns about the tribe’s mounting debt to the Malaysian casino giant.

In May, Tribal Council approved a budget that saw significantly fewer loan dollars from Genting than in previous years. This fiscal year, the tribe received $5.4 million in loans from Genting, which is less than half of what it received for fiscal year 2017. That year, the tribe received $11,944,567, an increase of approximately $250,000 over fiscal year 2016, according to budget data obtained by the Times.

Last year, the tribe laid off 31 of its roughly 100 government workers.

But Genting ramped up spending on lobbying this year in an apparent effort to influence the Department of the Interior as the federal agency was weighing an alternative pathway for the tribe to satisfy the eligibility requirements under the Indian Reorganization Act to secure its trust lands.

https://www.capecodtimes.com/news/20181206/mashpee-tribe-leader-warns-of-job-service-cuts