ICYMI 2024
In Case You Missed It: Some of our best stories of the year
The BoiseDev team is off for the holiday break. (We’ll keep an eye out for any major breaking stories.) While our team enjoys some downtime, we bring you a few stories you might have missed this year. A note that some stories may have new updates since the original date of publication. Have something we should know? Email us.
Idaho’s only Indigenous tribe without a casino of its own is asking the national and state governments to give a proposal for a Treasure Valley casino the thumbs down.
Last week, the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation on the Idaho-Nevada border put out a statement pushing the Biden administration and Governor Brad Little to reject the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes proposal to build a casino in Mountain Home. BoiseDev broke the news of both tribes eyeing land near I-84 in Elmore County in 2022.
This would be the Shoshone-Bannock tribe’s fourth casino, but it’s the first located off the tribe’s reservation in Fort Hall. This is legal, but only with the approval of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Governor Little and the City of Mountain Home. The $311 million project would include a 500,000-square-foot casino on a 157-acre plot the tribe purchased in 2020.
The Shoshone-Paiute tribe has been fiercely critical of the plan for the East Idaho tribe to bring gambling closer to the heavily populated Treasure Valley area for years. In the tribe’s statement, Shoshone-Paiute Tribes Chairman Brian Mason called the application for the casino in the city where most of the Duck Valley residents shop and use medical services “a bridge too far.”
Mason’s letter also invited Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to visit Duck Valley and Mountain Home before making a decision on the project.
“By allowing the Sho-Ban Tribes to situate itself in our homelands and with our best neighbor [Mountain Home], to the exclusion of the Sho-Pai Tribes, you will be relegating the Sho-Pai People to continued poverty,” he said.
The current status of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe’s application with the Department of the Interior is unknown. Neither the federal government nor the tribe responded to questions about its status prior to the publication of this story.
The Shoshone-Paiute told BoiseDev in 2022 they were eying their own piece of property for a casino in Elmore County and had submitted a letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs stating their intention of starting a gaming operation there, but the status of this project is unknown as well and their spokesman did not respond to a BoiseDev question inquiring about the status of their project.
This comes after the Biden administration moved to streamline the process governing tribal gaming applications and the land-in-trust process required for a casino off of the Fort Hall reservation in early 2023.
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