Tribe's giving is paying off

Joan Fawcett knew about the gift in advance. She had been coaxing it out for months. It didn't catch her unawares. Yet the theatrics had been so cleverly arranged that she found herself on her feet with the rest of the crowd at the charity gala a few weeks ago, blistering her palms with applause.

Confronted with the fact that a medical facility in Shakopee was turning away 60 people a month, a leader of the once-destitute but now casino-enriched Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community had just pledged $1 million to the cause. And some fierce critics of the tribe were among those stunned into what some remember as a five-minute-long ovation.

The tribe's biggest-ever gift by far to its immediate neighbors was the latest in a series of striking moments that appear to signal the start of a long-awaited thaw in the icy relationship between Scott County community leaders and the owners of the Mystic Lake casino -- a tribe many local residents resent for its overnight wealth.

The depth of the animosity has been a feature of local politics almost since gambling arrived in the 1980s. It was captured almost a decade ago in a book depicting life in a suburban high school. Teachers openly took digs at kids who were lucky enough to get free plots of land and a quarter of a million dollars the moment they turned 18.

Others in town spoke with disgust of the "fat cats on the reservation" who lived in huge mansions. According to a Scott County divorce filing from the period, members received annual payments of about $1 million from casino profits.

Plenty of suspicion and hostility remain. The tribe's critics dismiss much of what it does as self-publicized and self-serving. But there is also a sense of change. Though it still dishes out much of its charitable largesse to tribes in other states, as it has for many years, the tribe is taking a series of aggressively publicized steps to help its neighbors.

"There is a more positive relationship," said Scott County Commissioner Barbara Marschall, a veteran board member who has clashed with the tribe. "The projects that they come to the table with, and are wanting to participate in, have increased."

The tribe is allowing a new road to be built on its land, and it has resumed voluntary annual payments to the county of $280,000 a year in lieu of taxes, after ceasing to make them for several years.

On Thursday, the tribe's gigantic mobile health clinic was parked in front of a church in Shakopee, with tribal and county medical staff prepared to minister to any uninsured locals needing help. Only two lonely souls turned up in the first two hours -- but it was there.

The tribe has much to gain from improving its image. The Vikings' growing impatience over plans for a new football stadium, for instance, has brought a lot of talk about financing it by competing with tribes for casino gambling dollars.

But a growing number of outsiders are willing to give the tribe credit for being genuinely charitable. Scott County Board Chairman Jon Ulrich, for instance, doesn't dispute that many of the millions of dollars the tribe has offered to support road projects have helped to improve roads leading to the casino. But that's not always true, he said.

"They are allowing us to use their stimulus money at [County Roads] 42 and 17 because it's a dangerous intersection with many severe accidents," he said. "That site is not really that central to their own interests."

And Fawcett, fundraiser for the Saints Healthcare Foundation, recipient of the million-dollar challenge grant, said: "I believe in my heart it's not self-serving. I think they realized they were fortunate to have those dollars and realized, 'Oh my gosh, we have to help others.'"

Tribal officials chose not to comment for this article, and did not authorize a photographer inside the mobile clinic until the very last minute, after sitting on a request for several days.

No place for old houses

A top tribal staff member once summarized the tribe's history by saying that it's now a reservation without "any old houses." Until gambling arrived in the 1980s, everyone lived in a trailer.

By the time Elinor Burkett came along in 1999, gathering material for her 2001 book, "Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School," the tribe was resented as a very lucky group of a couple of hundred people benefiting lavishly from a casino deal designed to help lift a whole ethnic group out of poverty.

Since then the tribe has ramped up its charitable giving. In addition to tens of millions in annual grants, it has provided hundreds of millions in loans to other tribes. And it requires that a slice of its own vast spending on construction -- at least $300 million over the years in and around the Mystic Lake site, by one rough estimate -- must go to Native American workers.

About half of the workers carrying out a thorough remodeling of the casino today are Indians, said Mike Durene, job-site supervisor at Mystic Lake for Burnsville-based PCL Construction. "None from this tribe," he added, pointing out the window toward the rest of the reservation. "They don't need to work."

But that means union-wage jobs for people such as Connie Johnson, of the Red Lake Reservation up north, as a laborer, or Alex Blue, of the Upper Sioux community in western Minnesota, as a forklift driver. Or Louis Flammond, from South Dakota, whose own tribe's per capita payments -- "a couple hundred bucks" dished out around Christmas -- hardly cover the gas it requires to be there in person to collect it.

Much of the thaw with surrounding governments has been followed by cities and the county withdrawing legal challenges to the tribe's desire to expand its trust lands, taking land off the tax rolls.

More than it might realize, the tribe's habitual secretiveness and eccentricities often have gotten in the way of improving relationships, its friends and critics agree. Tribal officials have been known to make reporters wait for days before answering questions about a news release they sent out. Tribal administrator Bill Rudnicki was an unexplained no-show for a joint interview for this article with PCL Construction.

The tribe's eccentric media relations mirror its government-to-government contacts, some officials say.

"You'll ask a question and they'll say they have to talk to the tribal council, and you might or might not ever get an answer," Marschall said. "That's not how any other government behaves."

Added Dave Unmacht, Scott County's top administrator for many years until he left this year for the private sector: "We told them all along that one of the ways the tribe could minimize the complications from its land trust applications is to be more open and forthcoming about what they're trying to do. ... Just sitting down and talking goes a long way toward improving things."

Jack Haugen, mayor of Prior Lake and perhaps the tribe's strongest ally, said it is also about the manner in which the tribe itself is approached. "If you want to develop a relationship," he said, "you don't go in with some agenda or demands, you go in and sit down and have a cup of coffee and talk."

Shakopee Mayor John Schmitt is not quite as much of a fan.

Asked whether the tribe is laboring to improve things, Schmitt responded, "I certainly hope so." The million-dollar hospital donation was "tremendous," he said, but charity should be part of the tribe's makeup. "They depend on that facility as much as we do."

David Peterson • 952-882-9023