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Once, Chips Were Down; Now Tribe Has Cashed In

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By KAREN BRANCH-BRIOSO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 16, 2007

TAMPA - The Seminole Tribe of Florida has made its local presence known in big splashes:

The tribe dropped $13.2 million late last year to buy 738 acres of pastureland in north Lakeland. It plans to build homes there for tribe members displaced by its glitzy Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.

It owns 200 acres of new town homes, residences and vacant lots in Riverview's Panther Trace valued at $16 million by the property appraiser's office.

This weekend is the grand opening for the Tampa casino's expansion that makes it the tribe's largest gaming operation in Florida.

Things will get a lot splashier - especially on the revenue side - if the federal government signs off on an accord the tribe reached with Gov. Charlie Crist on Wednesday. It allows for more lucrative Las Vegas-style machines as well as blackjack and baccarat at its casinos.

It wasn't always so.

Just 27 years ago, the modern-day tribe's Tampa contingent was a small group of farmworkers who moved from Bradenton to form a reservation on an 8 1/2 -acre plot of land at the behest of their Florida council leaders. Today, that reservation is the 39-acre home of the Hard Rock.

The local tribe members, numbering about 75 today, live off-reservation. They'll get first dibs on homes built on the Polk County property.

"They live in various houses that we purchased or rent or leased," said Max Osceola, one of five council members who lead the Florida tribe today. "We have purchased land and we are going through the process of making that a reservation for them for their residential use, since they were displaced."

Tribe spokesman Gary Bitner said there is no plan to convert the Polk County property into another gaming site.

"There's no intent there," Bitner said. "That's not the case, because the way the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act is written, the land has to have been taken into trust at the time the act was signed into law, which was in the late '80s, for it to be eligible for gaming."

Gary Garrison, a spokesman with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, said the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 does allow some exceptions to that rule.

The hurdles would be nearly insurmountable for a tribe like the Seminoles of Florida.

They would need approval of the state government and the U.S. Secretary of the Interior before that could happen.

Since the 1988 law, that's happened only three times.

"On face value, the Seminole Tribe wouldn't fit because the exclusion is meant for tribes in remote areas who really have no chance of getting into a gaming operation," Garrison said. "Since they already have other casinos established and operating, the likelihood of ever getting approval would be slim to none."

The idea of having the expansive Lakeland site primarily for housing the tribe members is a remarkable change in fate.

The original 8 1/2 -acre reservation near Orient Road and I-4 in Tampa was created first as a site to bury the remains of Seminoles found on the excavation site of a city parking garage. The city asked the Seminoles to rebury the bones so it could finish the garage. They agreed. Then, so they could create a reservation, the tribal leaders needed members to live there. They asked Ruby Osceola Tiger and her clan of fewer than three dozen members to move there from a Bradenton farm.

"The farmer allowed them to live on his land, because they worked as labor for their fields. It wasn't real good housing," Max Osceola said. Ruby Tiger Osceola and her clan moved onto the property, where the tribe built simple apartment buildings for them.

"We made a reservation. We built a village where we reinterred the bones. We started a place to sell cigarettes. And bingo."

Less than three decades later, life is very different for the former farmworkers from Bradenton.

Ruby Tiger Osceola is gone. She died four years ago at age 106.

She and the other local tribe members had moved off the reservation to make room for the casino expansion. The Seminole housing authority owns at least 10 properties in Hillsborough where some of the local tribe members now live.

With federal rulings allowing high-stakes bingo on the reservations in 1981 and allowing limited casinos in 1988, tribal income skyrocketed. Gambling revenue is expected in the billions if the federal government signs off on a deal cut Wednesday with the state to expand casino games even more.

Gaming dividends that go to each of the 3,300 tribe members statewide - infants, too - soared from a reported $1,000 in the bingo hall years to $84,000 today, according to a Palm Beach Post report.

Max Osceola won't confirm how much each tribe member makes today. Or the tribe's budget, which started out in 1957 at $12,000.

"We've exceeded that" today, Osceola said with a chuckle.

The budget now includes free college tuition for any tribe members who want it. Osceola didn't have that luxury in the 1968-1969 school year he studied at the University of Tampa and played as a defensive lineman in that time when the school had a football team. Then, the federal government - not the cash-poor tribe - paid his tuition.

When Osceola graduated from the University of Miami in 1974, he was a novelty.

"At that time, I was only the second Seminole with a college degree," he said. "Today, we have almost 150 Seminoles with college degrees out of 3,300 Florida Seminoles. That's due to the effort of the tribal council funding education. Any college a Seminole wants to go to, we pay 100 percent."

That policy came after the advent of bingo halls on reservations in the mid-80s, he said.

"The profits of that went to the government and so they established that as a priority, to educate our youth, so we established a scholarship program," Osceola said. "I'm proud to say, a lot of those graduates are coming back and working on the tribal side - or the gaming side."

Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or kbranch-brioso@tampatrib.com.

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