The U.S. Department of the Interior recently rejected the Wyandotte Nation’s application to take into trust a 10.5-acre tract in the Wichita suburb of Park City, where the tribe hoped to build a casino, the Kansas Attorney General’s Office said. The Interior Department ruled the tribe did not have sufficient trust funds to have purchased both the Park City parcel and a tract in Kansas City, Kansas where it previously built a casino.
Formerly known as the Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma, the Wyandotte Nation filed a federal lawsuit in 2011 stating it needed to reacquire land it lost due to “failed federal policies” after receiving federal recognition in 1978. The tribe said the Interior Department had a “mandatory duty” to take the Park City land into trust since the tribe purchased it using money Congress had set aside to buy property to put into trust for the tribe’s benefit.
In 2012 a federal court said the state of Kansas, which tried to intervene in the Wyandotte Nation’s lawsuit, failed to show how it has been hurt by the Interior Department’s review of the tribe’s land-trust application. The state noted it had granted Peninsula Gaming the exclusive right to operate a casino in south-central Kansas, just 25 miles from Park City, and that its taxing, regulatory and economic interests were at stake.
But the case turned on money. In April 2013, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson ruled that an audit by the state of Kansas showed the tribe’s trust funds did not cover the purchases of both the Park City and Kansas City tracts. However, Robinson said the land-purchase issue was beyond her authority and she only could rule on the tribe’s claim of unreasonable delay. As a result, she ordered the Interior Department to make quarterly progress reports to make sure the tribe’s application was processed in a timely manner.
