Near the shopping complex is the Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, an 11,seat stadium with 12 practice fields and clubhouse facilities that serve as the spring training home for the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies. At the center of it all is the Talking Stick Resort, a room hotel-casino. For two years straight, Arizona has ranked sixth out of the 28 states in terms of gaming revenue produced by Indian casinos. The Talking Stick has slot machines along with 51 blackjack tables and a table poker room.
The draw, however, is a 1,seat bingo hall. The Salt River-Pima tribe is doing its part to help Arizona hold its place among the Indian casino states. The idea, when Indian casinos were approved in , was to give tribes the ability to create an economic benefit to their members, but also provide tax revenue to state and local jurisdictions. According to Arizona gaming regulations, tribes contribute 1 percent to 8 percent of their net revenue to the state, based on a sliding scale that takes into account numerous factors, Medina said.
The other 12 percent is returned to cities and counties where the casinos are located. We want the gaming to be limited and we review the casinos in five-year increments. But residents say that talk hasn't been backed up with action. For more stories that matter, subscribe to azcentral. Some Community members have called for a "forensic audit" of the tribal nation's finances. Such audits are intended to identify abuse and corruption, and they say in the past they have revealed conflicts of interest and self-dealing.
But residents say council members and the tribal government have shown hostility toward calls for transparency involving the casino.
Enos, who finished her last term as the tribe's president in and is now a council member , also stated that the audit "resulted in the expenditures of millions of your dollars, caused mistreatment of casino employees some of your relatives , delayed the expansion and jeopardized our business reputation.
The federal government's annual audits of gaming operations are a general look at casino financials but don't contain the level of detail in a forensic audit, Hogen said.
The annual audits can, however, raise concerns about above-average spending in certain parts of the enterprise. But these "exceptions" don't have to be reported to the Community, he said. Hogen said tribal communities are better off when gaming enterprises are proactive in sharing information. The analysis showed the recession hammered the Salt River's casinos.
Since then, the gaming enterprise has slowly increased its profits, but it still remains below its pre-recession peak. There is limited comparable data for other tribal gaming enterprises.
The closest figure is an estimate of gross gaming revenue — not adjusted for costs — published by Casino City Press in an annual report. That shows the average gaming enterprise in the state surpassed its pre-Recession revenue level by But gaming isn't growing at the rates it used to in Arizona, said Alan Meister, the author of Casino City Press report.
By building a resort, Salt River attempted to follow the lead of Las Vegas in increasing non-gaming revenues with hotel revenue, shopping, shows and other entertainment. Rivers said the resort could be the reason for sagging profits and per-capita checks. The tribal nation decided to include the resort's financial performance in its calculations of net revenue. He said he advocated against this while on the council because he worried the resort's expenses might drag down the profits.
While diversification beyond gaming has had a generally positive effect for tribes throughout the country, it's not realistic for tribes to expect the same success as the Las Vegas Strip, Meister said.
When the economic downturn hit, the tribal council committed to maintaining the distributions at that amount by subsidizing them with funds from the government's general budget for three years. But in , a letter to residents from then-President Enos said the subsidies would "drain the Community's resources" and "endanger the Community's ability to maintain its excellent credit rating, financial security and ability to provide vital services to all of its members.
The council voted to use gaming funds to pay off the Talking Stick construction loan and end the subsidies. Community member Mike Andrews said the payments were "initiated for the well-being of the tribe and people, and they seem to have gone away from that. Agnel Philip is a data reporter at The Arizona Republic.
In , it celebrates its 20th anniversary. Over the course of its two decades in the Valley it has become a staple, one very familiar to locals. Despite that familiarity, there are some things you may not know about Casino Arizona. Today, there are more than 9, enrolled tribal members. When Casino Arizona open in it opened as a poker room with just employees and 47 tables.
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