The Editor's Desk

Apparently reporter Jason Smith got a rather chilly reception from BarWest Spokesman Tom Shields at Monday’s City Council meeting following his reporting of internal troubles with the BarWest/Los Coyotes/Big Lagoon casino project.

Ah well — I’m not sure if there’s anybody left for us to alienate on the casino project. I’ll probably write an editorial using this as a reason why the city needs to step back and make the tribes and developers fight for the project themselves. I’m sure that will endear me further to them.

I must confess, despite the leaking of internal information, I’m not exactly sure what BarWest is so angry about. To me, they come off as the victim in this conflict. They’ve committed all this money and it turns out there’s an internal struggle among the Los Coyotes about who to partner with and people trying to cut BarWest out. On the other hand, it does show how fragile this agreement is, which undercuts their PR campaign of solidarity. Frankly, I think they need to think up a new message now that the cat’s out of the bag there. The amount of money they’ve spent already is a sign of their commitment to the project, so letting folks like Larry Halstead try to spin it like it’s bad for a developer to put their money behind a project is a bit strange.

We get calls every couple of months from anonymous folks who want us to “investigate” the Michigan bankrollers of the project, who have a less-than-gleaming reputation back home. I’m guessing for some, that we haven’t done so is a sign that we support them as the developer.

Editorially we support the project as we support pretty much any legal business that wants to come to Barstow. It’s not a judgment call over the worth of anybody involved with the efforts. I’m not going to make a decision over who would be the best developer (we’ll leave that for the people involved to decide, like any marketplace decision), and I don’t care who is the most “deserving” (an irrelevant distinction).

However, on the news side, when the casino was first announced — long, long ago when the only opposition was religious leaders who objected to gambling — we sat down and decided how we would go about covering the casino, given our limited resources as a small community newspaper. Once we learned about the lengthy process of actually getting this casino built, we decided that we would focus on the stages as they came to pass (or did not, as the case may be).

So, our first coverage was focusing on the city level for the agreements with the tribes, and then the state level to get the compacts approved. Our reasoning here was pretty simple: If the tribes couldn’t get permission from the state for the off-reservation casino, nothing else mattered. The BarWest backers’ reputations as developers weren’t particularly important if the tribes couldn’t get past the opposition from the other gaming tribes.

If the compacts ever did finally get approved, we actually discussed plans to send a reporter all the way to Michigan to explore the relationship between the developers and their home community. But if the casinos never move beyond the legislative stage, we can’t exactly justify all that work and expense.

So that’s the explanation why we don’t have more about Michael Malich and the Ilitches. It’s not time to take a look at them until the casino moves forward. Some folks want to claim it’s because we received ad money opposing Measure H from these folks in 2006. However, the reality is that gaming tribes have spent far, far more money in our newspapers advertising their events in our Weekender section, long before a casino was ever even announced for Barstow. (For that matter, the Chemehuevi advertised in our newspaper in 2004 as part of a PR campaign). If my views were for sale (which they’re not), the existing gaming tribes would have owned them long ago. We’ve jeopardized more advertising money by going against the Southern California tribes than we stand to gain from this one project.