Tim Steller's column: It's OK to ask what O'odham will do with Tucson land

At the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association‘s monthly meeting, an attendee delicately brought up a question that many people have pondered over the last month.

If the city finalizes transferring 10 acres of land to the Tohono O’odham Nation, he asked at the May 11 meeting, will the tribe build a casino there, the same way the Pascua Yaqui Tribe is building one at Grant Road and Interstate 10?

Tucson City Council member Lane Santa Cruz, the author of the land-transfer idea and the west-side’s representative, answered this way: “Not necessarily. I’ve heard a lot of questions and buzz about that, and it’s unfortunate that we essentialize native people into just casinos.”

She went on, “What I’m asking or what I’m hoping is that we give them the opportunity to explore what would be beneficial to their community, and also as a neighbor and as a partner in Menlo Park. I can have hopes or ideas for what they do, but if we’re really talking about self-determination and agency, that’s kind of letting them make that decision.”

This is the underlying tension in the city’s plan to transfer the historically important acreage to the Tohono O’odham Nation. As conceived, it is part of the “land back” movement — returning lands to indigenous people for them to manage. But that also means that the city government is asking residents to set aside any concerns they may have about the outcome.

As Mayor Regina Romero told me Thursday morning, “One of the first things we have to remember is that when we return land back to the indigenous community it belongs to, that they are a sovereign nation. It’s up to the nation to decide what they want to do there.”

Some West Side residents are willing to defer to the tribe. Only that one attendee raised concerns at the Menlo Park meeting.

And when I walked Barrio Sin Nombre Thursday evening, I did not find outright opposition to the transfer — just a mix of resignation to the machinations of the powers that be and hope that the tribe shares their vision for the area.

Bear and Niki Ballesteros, working outside on the cool, cloudy evening, told me they hope that when the land is transferred, it will stay natural, and they doubted the tribe would try to build a casino there.

“I don’t think it’s enough space,” Bear Ballesteros told me.

Sovereign tribal land

The property in question is historically crucial to local history. There are archeological sites dating back 4,500 years, burial sites and the sites of old structures from the mission days in the 1700s and 1800s.

At a City Council meeting April 18, Ned Norris Jr., the chairman of the nation, expressed gratitude and noted that “We believe as O’odham that we are ancestors of the Hohokam. The Hohokam are those who have gone before us.”

In an interview with my colleague Nicole Ludden, Norris said the nation does not have a planned use for the site, but “whatever the nation considers doing with that property should complement the intent of that whole area.”

In a statement Saturday, he said: "The Tohono O'odham Nation has no plans for this property. Any speculation otherwise is inaccurate and unproductive."

Once the Tohono O’odham gain ownership, they must conform to city zoning requirements, but Norris said they will consider putting the land in trust, which would ultimately make it sovereign tribal land. This years-long process would ultimately allow them to do what they want on the land.

It’s a similar process to the one the Tohono O’odham Nation used to put a new casino in Glendale, and the Pascua Yaqui tribe followed to build a casino near West Grant Road and I-10.

History in Glendale

I have a hard time imagining the tribe putting a casino or similar gaming facility on the west-side site. It’s different from the Glendale property in that it is small and also is culturally important to the Tohono O’odham people.

But the Glendale experience also shows the tribe has not always honored the spirit of gaming agreements. Arizona voters approved the 2002 gaming compact with the understanding that no additional casinos would be built outside of existing reservations.

The next year, 2003, the Tohono O’odham Nation used a shell company to buy 53 acres of unincorporated land next to Glendale in metro Phoenix. When in 2009 they announced the plan to bring the land into trust and build a casino there, the state government and other tribes contended they were violating the compact.

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The Tohono O’odham Nation argued everything they did was legal and that the real conflict was over the different tribes’ shares of the lucrative Phoenix market.

During years of litigation, federal judges acknowledged that the Tohono O’odham Nation’s actions violated the common understanding of the compact but said the letter of the law let them proceed with the new casino. Now the tribe has good relations with municipal officials and is opening a new casino west of Glendale.

The legitimate representative of the deepest-rooted indigenous people in this region, the Tohono O’odham Nation, is also a savvy operator of casinos and other businesses and an influential political player.

Little notice of plan

It was a profound moment April 18 when the City Council voted unanimously to move ahead with negotiations to complete the transfer.

“I always felt that in the city of Tucson we don’t honor and revere our indigenous people, the people who made this city possible,” Santa Cruz said. “This move by the mayor and council to return land back to the Tohono O’odham Nation is honoring Tucson’s indigenous legacy, that we are still here, and that these lands are still sacred.”

The decision to proceed may have been a victory for reconciliation, but it was also a moment of top-down decision-making by the city that shut out much of the public. While some clued-in residents of Menlo Park have known about the discussions with the nation for a couple of years, most didn’t.

The woman who has led the years-long process of formulating a Menlo Park neighborhood plan, Wendy Sterner, said only a handful of people knew of and supported the plan to hand over this key parcel up until the April council meeting and May neighborhood meeting.

“Lane (council member Santa Cruz) has never once engaged the Menlo Park neighborhood in a conversation about the issue, and she hasn’t acted as if she believes that people most impacted by development should have any say in the fate of that land,” she said in an email.

“In short, gifting the land to the TO (Tohono O’odham Nation) has not been a part of the neighborhood plan, or openly considered in formulating the plan.”

Former neighborhood association president Zach Yentzer, who took part in the planning process, said “very little consultation” about the transfer idea. He added, “It’s hard to have a master plan when a huge chunk is not on the table.”

Kylie Walzak, the current president of the neighborhood association, expressed support for the transfer plan at the May 11 meeting but noted last week that the association has not taken a formal position on it.

‘Better stewards than the city’

The transfer takes place against the backdrop of city elections this year. Santa Cruz has opposition in the primary and general elections, and Romero will have opposition in the general election. Ward 1 Democratic primary candidate Miguel Ortega declined to comment on the transfer.

Within the neighborhood, there might be more opposition to the transfer idea if action on this land hadn’t been stalled for so long. When voters approved the Rio Nuevo plan in 1998, the idea was that it would become a Tucson Origins Heritage Park.

It wasn’t widely understood, though, that much of the empty land from the Santa Cruz River to South Grande Avenue was an undevelopable landfill. Twenty-five years later, the Mission Garden exists, Caterpillar’s big new office is there, but little else has been done on the land because it costs so much to remediate the landfills.

The tribe’s taking over these 10 acres offers hope that something good will happen, along with a little trepidation.

“I think they’ll be better stewards than the city was when they did the dump sites,” area resident Raul Ramirez said of the Tohono O’odham Nation.

That’s almost certainly true. Still, it strikes me as unfair to residents who live nearby and have been working on a neighborhood plan to tell them that the land transfer is a good thing, but they shouldn’t question what will happen on the land.

It’s the job of city officials to ask those questions and get those answers, not to tell residents that questioning is out of bounds.