Win-River Casino Expansion Approved, Tribe Braced for Lawsuits

, a tribal gaming operator based in Shasta County, Northern California, has received the federal all-clear to move its a couple of miles to the east.

The casino is within the tribe’s reservation, just outside the town of Redding. And while it will not be moving far, it’s causing a lot of controversy up in Shasta County.

Since 2016, the tribe has sought to tear down the existing casino and rebuild a significantly enlarged version on a plot of land it owns called Strawberry Fields. But because the new location was not part of its reservation, it needed approval from the US Interior Department.

That arrived on July 1 when the department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agreed to take the land into trust for the tribe. That’s the process by which the federal government partially removes land from the jurisdiction of the state and converts it into sovereign tribal land, a prerequisite for tribal gaming.

The tribe hopes it’s now a case of Strawberry Fields forever. But Redding Rancheria CEO Tracy Edwards told local CBS affiliate KRCR-TV that she was bracing for lawsuits challenging the land-in-trust decision.

The casino expansion is fiercely opposed by a group calling itself Speak Up Shasta! (SUS!), and others. The group claims the new casino would spoil agricultural land, exacerbate traffic, and threaten native wildlife in the Sacramento River.

SUS! also argues Strawberry Fields is the site of the Sacramento River Massacre of 1846, in which hundreds of Wintu people were killed by a group of settlers, although this claim is disputed.

The Rancheria wants to build a 70,000-sq.-ft. casino and nine-story, 250-room hotel, along with event, retail, and convention and space. The complex would be triple the size of the existing casino.

It hopes the development will benefit from greater footfall because of its proximity to Interstate-5. This, along with the creation of new jobs, will boost the local economy, the tribe says.

But in February, another opposition group called the California Land Stewardship Council sued the Shasta County Board of Supervisors.

The lawsuit argued that an agreement signed by the county board to help fund law enforcement, fire, and emergency services for the new casino was illegal because it “gave away millions of dollars of public funds.”

In a statement this week, the tribe noted that the BIA’s “monumental decision … included nearly two decades of comprehensive expert analysis into the environmental, economic, and social impacts of our proposed casino relocation project.