Koi Nation tribe plans for casino in Sonoma
The Koi Nation Native American tribe said on Wednesday it plans to build a casino and resort on a 68-acre site in unincorporated Sonoma County at 222 E. Shiloh Road North of Santa Rosa near the Shiloh Ranch Regional Park.
The tribe said in a news release it had filed plans to build on the site, exercising its sovereign rights under federal law as one of the state’s federally recognized Native American tribes.
“The Koi Nation has had to struggle harder than almost any other Tribe in California to re-establish our sovereignty,”
Tribal Chairman Darin Beltran, said in a statement. “Despite this treatment, however, we have endured. It is time to exercise our rights as a federally recognized Tribe to have our own land and to control our own destiny.”
The development will include 2,500 gaming machines, a hotel with 200 rooms, restaurants, a meeting center and a spa, the tribe said.
The $600 million development would cover about 1.2 million square feet and have around 2,000 employees when completed, along with creating roughly 1,000 construction jobs over the next four years, according to Sam Singer, a spokesman for the tribe.
“It is time to exercise our rights as a federally recognized Tribe ... to control our own destiny.” Koi Nation Tribal Chairman Darin Beltran
Singer said the tribe purchased the land this month for $12.3 million.
Unlike some other casinos, the property will be nonsmoking.
The tribe said its attorneys have moved to place the land in a federal trust, making it eligible for gaming under the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. That will be followed by an environmental review and public comment period to begin in two to three months, the tribe said.
If approved and built, the project would become the third largest Native American gaming operation in the county, along with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria Graton Resort & Casino in Rohnert Park and River Rock Casino operated by the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians near Geyserville.
The Koi Nation is one of the remaining groups of Pomo people who lived for thousands of years on an island in Clear Lake. They were exploited as slaves and cheap labor during the Gold Rush and were displaced when their homes were burned by settlers, according to the tribe, who have remained landless for most of the last century and a half.
The U.S. federal government in 1916 relegated the Koi Nation to a rancheria near Clear Lake that could not support the tribe, and its leaders instead settled in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa.
The rancheria was terminated in 1956, along with the tribe’s sovereignty and land rights, until a 2019 federal court decision in a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of the Interior.
That decision recognized the tribe along with the right to establish a sovereign land base.