Council meets on Monday, and the most interesting thing might be a Memorandum of Understanding with the Siletz Tribe for land on which they had hoped, and still may hope, to build a large casino. (Recent developments in southern Oregon with the Coquille tribe and a proposed casino there may be relevant.)
The Staff Report says
The Siletz Tribe is a federally recognized, sovereign Indian tribe. Federal law allows the Siletz Tribe to apply to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to have property within the city of Salem to be held in trust by the United States for the benefit of the Tribe. Once property is converted to Trust land, the property is no longer subject to the regulatory authority of the City and is exempt from property tax.
When these properties are developed by the Tribe, the Tribe is not obligated to receive City land use or building code approval as part of project development. However, the properties do require City services, such as utilities and connections to City infrastructure, and police and fire service.
The purpose and intent of the MOU is to ensure that the Tribe has the same rights and obligations as other residents and property owners within the city, with the understanding that the Tribe is a sovereign nation and exempt from many local, state and federal laws.
The language is all very general and does not point to what is the current intent for the land. The item is also on the consent calendar, and is not positioned to invite discussion.
A casino positioned on I-5 with all the driving it will induce has seemed like it would be a tragic mistake. But up north in Vancouver, BC, there is a project for housing that seems like it could offer a better model, not for towers in particular, but for the housing.
- Here from 2022, "Losing our Way on Climate: Casino and Kuebler Village Move Forward"
- At the City of Vancouver, "Sen̓áḵw development"
- The project website, "Sen̓áḵw"
- And at Architectural Digest, "A Multi-Billion Dollar Real Estate Project Is Rising on Native Reserve Land in Vancouver" (2021)
And even with the criticism of a casino here, it is necessary to interpret and analyze the matter in conjunction with readings like those offered in David Lewis' recent book, Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley.
He writes about the Kalapuya in particular, but the general case is true for the Siletz also. (As with the case for the Coquille tribe, there are also sometimes conflicts between tribes, and there may be conflict here also considering Spirit Mountain and its regional draw, but that does not alter the longer point, and in fact may reinforce it as divide-and-conquer is a real strategy.)
When American pioneers arrived in Oregon, tribal ownership of the lands was ignored. Settlers discredited all tribal claims and the tribes' basic humanity by suggesting and acting as if tribal peoples did not have religion, civilization, laws, governance, or ability to manage their own affairs, much less own land....Our people have lived in Oregon for more than ten thousand years and lived well off the land. Yet in a short period of time in the 1850s, we lost all our rights and future wealth for generations to come....Our status as a disenfranchised people came about because of the actions of settlers in taking everything from us, then establishing an Indian administrative system which continued to enforce our poverty for the past one hundred and seventy years. When our people got a little land in 1891, and held onto it for twenty years, the federal government established new programs to take away that lane. When we began to recover and again gain some land in the 1940s, we were terminated, and again lost the land and any wealth we had saved.
It will be interesting to see what are the plans for the land and how it all shakes out.
More particularly on transportation, the new Mayor has her first slate of Council appointments, and they are not as disruptive as they might have been. In fact, they mostly offer continuity and are not anything to object to.
Councilor Varney, who had been the backup to former Councilor Phillips on SKATS and MWACT, will now be the principal representative, and Councilor Tigan the alternate. (Still, just when an Elected gets fully up to speed, they leave and it will take months and years for the new Elected to attain that same level of knowledge. The churn costs institutional and personal knowledge, and advantages the administrative staff.)
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| Part of the slate of appointments |
The Bond Implementation Committee and Climate Action Plan Committees will have a little more change, in particular with Mayor J. Hoy (we'll be using C. Hoy/J. Hoy for clarity, at least for a while here) now on the Bond Committee. But the overall balance does not seem terribly different.
It had seemed possible she would take her cues from the reactionary administrative dismantling and realignment in DC currently underway, and it is good to see, for the moment anyway, a real small c-conservative approach to maintain rather than the revolutionary approach prevailing in DC.
Other items:
- On the airport boondoggle, the City looks to raise landing and overnight parking fees on aircraft since revenues are not meeting projections. "[T]he airport’s five-year forecast shows an unsustainable financial trend beyond the next two years."
- On the accreditation for Public Works, they have nice things to say about the new building. (Of course they should since it was not a cheap building!)
- And because a sidewalks and bike lanes project in east Salem on State Street at 49th requires a set of small corners for curb ramps on County land, there is an Intergovernmental Agreement to move that along.
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