The draft environmental impact statement for the controversial Enterprise Rancheria hotel and casino project in Yuba County is done and soon will be available for public scrutiny, according to a federal official.

The document, enclosed in three, 4-inch binders, addresses the project’s impacts on the surrounding environment and whatever mitigation measures are necessary to offset those effects.

“This is a big, voluminous document,” said Patrick O’Mallen, an environmental protection specialist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Sacramento.

Before the EIS is released, the bureau’s office in Washington, D.C., must issue a “notice of availability,” which states the document is up for public review, O’Mallen said. He doesn’t know when that notice will be issued.

“It’s on their desk,” O’Mallen said.

Once the document is released, the public has 45 days to submit written comments, he said.

There will be a public hearing in which people can voice their thoughts to bureau officials on the project. The date is not set.

Yuba County supervisors asked for a full EIS in August 2004 after BIA released an environmental assessment.

The Estom Yumeka Maidu tribe of the Enterprise Rancheria in Oroville is proposing the $150 million project on 40 acres in the Yuba County sports and entertainment zone along Forty Mile Road near the Sleep Train Amphitheatre.

The project would feature an eight-story hotel with 170 rooms, retail space, restaurants, an exercise room, laundry room, pool area and an arcade. The casino would take up one story of a separate two-story convention center.

Since the tribe is a sovereign nation, it doesn’t pay taxes. The tribe and the county reached an agreement in 2002 that would provide the county $70 million over 15 years and $5 million a year, thereafter adjusted for inflation.

The question of whether the casino should be built was posed to county voters as Measure G in November 2005. The measure lost 48.2 percent 51.8 percent. Casino supporters decided to press on.

“Are we to abandon the other 49 percent of the people that voted for us?” asked Alan Waskin, Yuba County Entertainment LLC's senior vice president of legal and business affairs, in a November 2005 interview. “This is something that is desperately needed in the area.”

Dan Logue, a Yuba County supervisor opposed to the project, said there are no surprises so far, and that the draft EIS release has been expected. He said the tribe should stop pursuing the idea of a casino because the majority of county residents who voted don’t want one here,
“The primary issue here is the tribe had asked the citizens to vote on this.... and the citizens voted it down and that’s all that needs to be said,” Logue said.

While the bureau is considering the project, another arm of the Bureau is looking at whether the 40-acre lot should be taken into a trust on behalf of the tribe. Currently, the plot of land is not sovereign land, and must go through the federal process to make it so.

At the end of the 45-day comment period on the draft, the bureau will compile the comments and address them in the final environmental impact statement, which will be released at a later date.

Bureau staffers will eventually make a recommendation to their leadership to accept or deny the proposal before a “decision of record” is issued, which is the bureau’s final word on the project.

But issues such as traffic, pollution, noise and crime are some of the big issues raised by opponents previously.

Whether the bureau will approve the project remains to be seen. In a Feb. 13 letter to tribal chief Glenda Nelson, Wes Cason, an associate deputy secretary of the Department of Interior, said times are changing and bureau policies may be changing as well.

“We anticipate changes to the rules that may result in fewer off-reservation properties being accepted into trust,” Cason wrote.

“In particular, we expect to consider a paradigm where the likelihood of accepting off-reservation land into trust decreases with the distance the subject parcel is from the tribe’s established reservation or ancestral lands and the majority of tribal members,” he wrote.

Appeal-Democrat reporter Daniel Witter can be reached at 749-4712. You may e-mail him at dwitter@appealdemocrat.com.