$500 million project could be slated for San Juan Bautista
The Red Hawk Indian Casino, a $500 million project near Hwy. 101
and Hwy. 156 previously described in the Pinnacle as a hoax might
be no joke. Viewed by Pinnacle staff after publication, the bid
request on www.bidclerk.com contained a location map and the
contact information for various representatives of the Rockwell
Group, but the name and phone number of Charles Heinz, originally
listed as the developer, was removed.
$500 million project could be slated for San Juan Bautista
The Red Hawk Indian Casino, a $500 million project near Hwy. 101 and Hwy. 156 previously described in the Pinnacle as a hoax might be no joke. Viewed by Pinnacle staff after publication, the bid request on www.bidclerk.com contained a location map and the contact information for various representatives of the Rockwell Group, but the name and phone number of Charles Heinz, originally listed as the developer, was removed.
“I don’t think it was a joke at all,” said a local contractor who e-mailed the original bid request to Pinnacle staff and requested his name be withheld. “You look at the developer, there was a phone number and everything for him. All of a sudden that guy’s name is off there. That’s what makes it more suspicious.”
Anthony Botelho, a supervisor for San Benito County, agreed that it is suspicious.
“I just don’t believe that that shows any good faith on their part,” Botelho said. “That just gives you an idea of how they’re going to operate.
Heinz said he does not know why only his name was removed from the bid.
“I did not know that,” Heinz said this week. “I don’t know. I was told that it was taken down.”
The local contractor who first spotted the bid has been using BidClerk for several years.
“Whenever you propose anything to the county or the city, you always do the renderings,” he said. “Maybe they were doing renderings and the drawings and it leaked out too early.”
A possible location for the casino could be the Nyland property, a parcel advertised for sale that is more than 100 acres located at Hwy. 101 and Hwy. 156, he said.
Despite repeated calls over a three-week period of time, calls to the Rockwell Group were not returned.
Casinos are not a new venture for the Rockwell Group, whose architects designed one of the largest in the world, the Mohegan Sun Casino and Resort in Uncasville, Conn., according to a Web site from the Rockwell Group.
A two-and-a-half hour drive from New York City, Mohegan Sun contains a 1,200-room hotel, spa, golf course and planetarium, with nearly 40 places to eat, including food courts, restaurants and bars.
Another casino, the Mohican Casino, was slated for Sullivan County, N.Y., until the New York State Assembly put it on hold, said Jonathan Rouis, chairman of the legislature for Sullivan County.
Members of the Rockwell Group worked with the Stockbridge-Munsee band of Mohican Indians, a Wisconsin-based tribe that bought land in New York State, according to a Web site from encyclopedia.com.
Located 90 miles west of New York City, Sullivan County is perhaps most famous for the 1969 music festival Woodstock.
“We’re the suburbs, but not far from metropolitan New York,” Rouis said.
Home to Bethel Woods, people visit Sullivan County for its natural beauty, said Lorraine Cohen, who answers inquiries at the Sullivan County Visitors Center.
“People come specifically to be out of the city,” Cohen said.
The casino project was ongoing for seven or eight years, Rouis said. Not as large as Mohegan Sun, it was nevertheless a fairly extensive facility, Rouis said.
“It was modeled after the Mohegan Sun model,” Rouis said. “It was a pretty large proposal.”
Sullivan County officials dealt mostly with the tribe, Rouis said.
“Our experience with [the Rockwell Group] as developers, and people to work with, has been reasonable,” Rouis said. “They design nice stuff.”
Opponents of the project disagreed.
“They’re tenacious,” said Kal Rizzuto, help desk administrator for the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, a nonprofit dedicated to trail preservation. “Basically, you’re going to have to round up a whole lot of people who care about the environment.”
Rockwell Group officials did not listen to their concerns, Rizzuto said.
“It’s been a lot of back and forth over the last few years about how big it should be and how they’re not really paying attention to the environmental and scenic implications,” he said.
Botelho was never approached about the casino, he said.
“I believe that people who are looking to establish any type of business in San Benito County should be very transparent as far as what they intend to do and the effects on the local economy,” Botelho said. “By deleting information it just is very much suspicious as far as the benefit that it truly does bring. Hopefully it’ll go the way the other casino went, elsewhere or not at all.”
Botelho was referring to an earlier proposal for a casino located near Hollister Airport.
Anne Marie Sayers, a Costanoan-Ohlone Indian who has a homestead in Indian Canyon off Cienega Road, has never heard of the project.
“To get land into trust is almost impossible and gaming has to be in trust land,” Sayers said. “It took me eight years to get this land into trust so I could build on my great grandfather’s home site.”
Sayers does not know if the project could happen without the support of local indigenous people, she said.
“The likelihood of this happening is, who knows?” Sayers said.
It could happen anywhere, Botelho said.
“Hopefully the community comes together, as was the case the last time, and discourages something like that being established in this area,” Botelho said. “I don’t think it brings any benefits whatsoever. It brings a lot of problems.”
Byron Turner, assistant planning and building director for San Benito County received the same e-mail as Pinnacle staff and said that it looks like a bid from a construction Web site. County officials said they never heard about the project and agreed that it was unlikely that anyone would put a casino project out to bid without first obtaining the necessary permits.
After speaking with Charles Heinz, who was listed on the bid as the developer, Pinnacle staff originally determined that the bid might be a hoax.
It was only after the bid request remained online and the local contractor spoke up that suspicions about the proposal’s genuineness re-emerged.
