After two years, Sen. Roy Ashburn only legislative advocate for ill-conceived Barstow Compacts

6.30.07

Ashburn boosts casino project

FROM STAFF REPORTS
Ashburn pushes Barstow casino hearing

During debate about unrelated casino compacts on the state Senate floor on Thursday, June 28, Senator Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, stood up to address the stalled Big Lagoon-Los Coyotes Barstow casino project.

“There are Native Americans in two parts of California that seem to be invisible, the Los Coyotes members and the members of the Big Lagoon tribe,” Ashburn said, according to a press release. “They have a compact that they negotiated with the Governor, yet we don’t even have a hearing. These are Native Americans who are receiving none of the benefits for a proposed casino that is located in probably the most ideal location in all of California for a casino.”

The compacts have been held up in Senate committees for months. Environmental groups worry that further delay will prompt the Big Lagoon tribe to begin construction of a casino on their reservation, an environmentally fragile area in northern California.

http://www.desertdispatch.com/news/casino_904___article.html/report_city.html

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Click on picture or link below to hear CA State Senator Roy Ashburn's impassioned, ill-informed comments.

As you're listening, recall that, despite Ashburn's apparent memory loss at the time he made these remarks, both the Senate and Assembly Governmental Organization committees did hold hearings on the Barwest Compacts in 2006:

• the Senate Committee chose politely "no further action,"


• the Assembly Committee voted outright to reject the Compacts and only out of standard courtesy did Chairman Jerome Horton agreed to leave the door open for reconsideration (certainly Horton assumed, as would normally be the case, that if they were to return for a second round they would somehow be modified or renegotiated to address concerns voiced by legislators and opponents and of course they have not).
  
  After two years Roy Ashburn was the only person to rise in support of the ill-conceived Barstow Compacts.

Senator Ashburn urges action on the Barstow Gaming compacts that were previously rejected in the Assembly during Senate Floor debate, June 28th (1.4mb, mp3)