Tribal gaming in Wisconsin is looking for revenue sources. The Lac du Flambeau Chippewa’s online payday loan centers are there for you. Want to place an online bet? The tribe soon hopes to handle that for you as well. Three years after the Lac du Flambeau defaulted on a $50 million bond — a move that remains the subject of a court fight — and five years after it considered mortgaging portions of its reservation, the Vilas County tribe is aggressively looking at the Internet for ways to increase its revenue.
Tom Maulson, the tribe’s blunt-talking president, dismisses critics who see gambling and high-interest, short-term lending as businesses that prey on the poor. “It’s legal to do, and we’re doing it legally,” Maulson said. Tribal gaming and their governments across the US are looking at online businesses because they offer tribes the opportunity to tap revenue from consumers who might not travel to reservations, which are often in remote areas.
“The Internet is a robust environment to grow our economy, and we’re looking for ways to leverage (the tribe’s) sovereignty in a responsible manner,” said Brent McFarland, the Lac du Flambeau’s director of business development. “We see the Internet as a tremendous opportunity to do that.”
Since May the tribe has launched three online payday lending companies, two of which came online this month, and set up the infrastructure for an Internet casino. If online gambling were legalized throughout the country or in Wisconsin, “we could just flip a switch” and turn the online casino, which currently uses play money, into one that takes bets using real money, Maulson said.
Tribal gaming may not wait for a law change before taking online bets on a limited basis — only via Internet connections available within the boundaries of the tribe’s reservation — as it is a driving force in the Tribal Internet Gaming Alliance, a group hoping to launch a multi-tribe online casino.
Because that dreamed-of casino would offer only online poker, bingo and high-speed video slots linked to bingo — games known in federal law as Class II gaming — it could be offered on the grounds of reservations without a change in the law, said Jeffrey Nelson, the Washington-based attorney for the alliance.
The Chippewa Tribe is not alone in looking at cyberspace for revenue. About two dozen tribes across the country have launched short-term lending operations online, and the potential of online gaming is being talked about by tribes, states and Congress. This Tribal gaming story originally appeared on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
