Writings - Freelance Articles
Soo Tribe Scores Biggest Win Yet
Indian Gaming News - December 22, 1997
The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians held a party recently at their brand-new casino resort.
Some 500 guests ate catered food, danced to live country music and listened as community leaders spoke about the tribe’s latest success.
The occasion was not the Labor Day opening of the resort itself, or of the 300-room hotel and convention center, the largest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The Soo tribe was celebrating its biggest victory yet—winning one of three coveted spots to build a casino in downtown Detroit.
Standing in the middle of it all was tribal chairman Bernard Bouschor, 48, a soft-spoken man in a conservative suit who has seen the project through from the beginning.
In the process, he and the tribe beat out better-financed proposals from more established big-city gaming concerns. He also helped score a coup for Native American tribes everywhere—the first tribe-owned and operated casino in a major U.S. city.
Bouschor sees Detroit as the next logical step in an ongoing drive toward tribal self-sufficiency.
“I look at it like a ladder,” said Bouschor, in the middle of his third four-year term as tribal chairman. “We’re making improvements one step at a time.”
Cut to 1974, when Bouschor became the tribe’s second paid employee as its office manager—his sister Beverly was first, hired to take minutes at tribal meetings. Bouschor had just graduated from the nearby Lake Superior State University with a degree in business administration, and his options included going to work for a heavy-equipment operator for a union salary or taking a chance with the fledgling tribal government. He took the chance.
It was a big risk. Unemployment was rampant with half of the tribal members out of work on some reservations, alcoholism was widespread, and few of the tribe’s homes had running water.
“It was pretty much a community in decline,” tribal spokesman John Hatch said.
Bouschor had grown up with hardship himself. Raised in a four-room house on a dirt road on the edge of Sault Ste. Marie, the family had little money. When he contracted polio in the first grade, family members had to borrow a car to drive him to a hospital in Marquette, 165 miles away. He stayed there for a year, learning to read by leafing through the hospital’s book collection and comic books borrowed from another boy. He does not remember seeing his family again until they picked him up to take him home.
When he took over as office manager, the tribe had only been federally recognized for two years, and placed its first property in trust status the year he was hired. Bouschor helped apply for federal grants for housing and education, and did the accounting work necessary to keep the grant dollars flowing.
But tribal members soon chafed at the strings attached to federal dollars, Hatch said, including the fact that children were not taught tribal customs or the Ojibwe language in the local schools.
“You had to change your tradition, culture, sometimes even your beliefs,” Hatch said. “The leadership realized we had a choice. We could stay tethered to the federal government with their rules and regulations, or go our own way.”
In 1985, the Soo tribe bet it all on a 3,600-square-foot blackjack parlor.
“The tribe mortgaged everything we had—cars, trucks, little pieces of land, buildings—to raise the money,” Hatch said.
The gamble soon paid off.
“The lines went around that casino every day, it was packed, and we paid off the mortgage in just over a year,” Hatch said.
The tribe now operates five casinos in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, including its new flagship casino resort in Sault Ste. Marie. Other businesses include eight hotels, a chain of convenience stores, a neon sign factory and a plant that remanufactures axles for front-wheel-drive cars.
In the last 10 years, employment in tribal operations has gone from 800 to over 3,000, with casino operations employing more than 2,000. The casino operations themselves have broadened their focus, offering big-name entertainment and convention facilities along with the slots and card tables.
“We have to keep pace with the casino market, with casino development in the state of Michigan,” Hatch said. “Casinos have to reach out to people who are coming for a couple of days ... they have to become destination sites.”
Sault Ste. Marie is a port town on the Canadian border, across St. Mary’s River from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, a city of 80,000. As the tribe’s casino operations have expanded, bridges connecting the U.P. to Canada and Michigan’s Lower Peninsula have seen record-breaking amounts of traffic each year.
“We do the reverse of Detroit,” Hatch said. “We import people to play.”
Revenue from the casino operations—over $300 million last year— pump over $22 million a year into tribal programs, Bouschor said. They also generate nearly $10 million a year for state and local governments under the state compacts that sanction tribal casinos.
Bouschor sees it as part of investing in the tribe’s most important renewable resource, its people.
“We’re funding the tribe’s social security,” he said.
The Soo tribe has been looking south to the untapped Detroit market for almost a decade. Tribal members teamed with 400 Monroe Associates, a company run by Detroit businessmen Ted Gatzaros and Jim Papas, about nine years ago to give themselves a hometown advantage. The businessmen had been working since the 1970s to bring casinos to their Greektown development area, starting with discussions with the late Coleman Young, the city’s former mayor.
Detroit voters rejected gambling initiatives four times since 1976 before finally approving casino gaming for the city in 1994. The businessmen suffered another setback in 1995 when Gov. John Engler overrode the recommendations of his blue ribbon panel on gaming and rejected the idea of private casinos anywhere in the state.
The Greektown businessmen and another Detroit business group put the issue on the state ballot in 1996, and it narrowly passed after a last-minute ad campaign, fueled in part by $3.5 million from the Soo tribe.
The Detroit casino is the tribe’s biggest gamble yet. Its size alone sets the project apart—a 1,000-room hotel with twin towers more than 40 stories tall, 100,000 square feet of gaming space, employing an estimated 4,000 people. The A $519-million complex will also include a children’s center, 1,600-seat theater, restaurants and stores.
Annual casino revenues are projected around $400 million , Hatch said, a third of the $1.2 billion to $1.7 billion estimated Detroit market.
But the casino will also be located in the heart of a major city rather than in a small town—Sault Ste. Marie has a population of 18,000, compared to Detroit’s million-plus people. The casino will have instant and serious competition—from the two other new operations backed by Vegas powerhouses MGM Grand and Circus Circus, and from an established casino across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.
Hatch said tribal leaders are excited at the prospect, noting that the tribe’s five casinos drew over four million visitors last year.
“We know how to build and operate casinos; we’ve demonstrated that.” he said. “If we can do that in the wilds of the U.P., we’re eager for Detroit.”
Bouschor noted that there are 6.5 million people within an hour’s drive of Detroit.
“That’s a tremendous market to draw from,” he said. “It’s an urban market that casino gaming is new to, but we’re the only Michigan developers in that market today with Michigan casinos.”
The tribe hopes to have a temporary casino open in Greektown by the end of 1998, and open the doors to its permanent casino by 2001.