The Herald Business Journal


YOUR COUNTY.	YOUR BUSINESS JOURNAL.

Published September 2001

Tulalips'
PLAN OF ACTION
With a new casino, hotels and retail in the works, Quil Ceda Village could draw millions of people and dollars

By John Wolcott
Herald Business Journal Editor

Snohomish County’s tourism and hospitality industry received a tremendous boost a few weeks ago when the Tulalip Tribes announced multimillion-dollar plans for a new casino, two hotels, a convention center and a number of recreational facilities as part of their new Quil Ceda Village development west of Marysville. (For an illustration of the development, click here.)

Along with the tribes’ retail developments, the gaming and tourism attractions are expected to draw several million people to north county annually.

Next September, the new $72 million Tulalip Casino will open, to be followed within a year by a 150- to 250-room hotel. Then, the tribes will build a convention center with facilities for up to 2,000 people and a second hotel.

But the story of the Tulalip Tribes’ development of Quil Ceda Village and its impact on Snohomish County is overshadowed by the even bigger story of the transformation of the Tulalip Tribes from a struggling community dependent on welfare and unemployment benefits to an economic powerhouse that seems destined to change the course of the county’s development for decades to come.

“Just a decade ago, we had an unemployment rate of 60-plus percent for tribal members, compared to 4 percent in the predominant society around us,” said John McCoy, Director of Governmental Affairs for the tribes. “Now, it’s in the teens, and the majority of those individuals are from the logging and fishing industries, so we try to attract businesses for those skills to reduce unemployment even more.”

The tribes’ economic developments also have made it possible for the Indians to bring back their Tulalip culture and language at the same time tribal members are tapping into such new fields as the Internet and high-tech telecommunications systems.

As new details of the Tulalips’ master-planned economy have become public, they have revealed an intriguing picture of economic changes for both the county and the tribes. Here’s a look at what’s in store.

Quil Ceda Business Park
“We started with a 2,000-acre base blessed with wonderful streams,” said Peter Mills, Business Park Manager for the tribes. “Quil Ceda Creek is one of our jewels, and we want to protect that, so we will develop a wetlands area on 60 or so acres for passive recreation activities and salmon habitat. That (environmental concern) was a fundamental element that was planned first before the business development.”

The tribes plan to enhance their existing wetlands area to encourage salmon-bearing streams as one of its major goals. Already, some chum salmon are migrating back to that area, and the tribes want to add spring Chinook to their list as well.

“Overall, the total build-out cost for the front of the development (along I-5 between the 88th and 116th Street NE interchanges) will be something less than $1 billion. We have $10 million invested so far, and we’ll probably get to $50 (million) or $60 million in cold cash from the tribes,” Mills said.

The park’s first major tenant, Wal-Mart, opened last April, followed by its neighbor, Home Depot, in August. Plans for a third major “box” store adjacent to Home Depot are on hold for now, Mills said, leaving that space open for a variety of possible developments.

By Sept. 1, a retail strip mall at the south end of the business park should be open. Space is reserved for tribal members who want to open their own businesses, plus a large facility for the Greater Marysville Tulalip Chamber of Commerce’s offices, business center, teleconferencing room and Visitor Information Center.

New Tulalip Casino
The new 227,000-square-foot casino will be three times the size of the present one northwest of the Fourth Street/I-5 interchange, filled with 52 gaming tables and 1,500 “slot” machines that look like Las Vegas casinos’ famous “one-armed bandits.”

There also will be three restaurants at the casino, Operations Manager Chuck James said, including a 175-seat fine-dining restaurant on par with “the Metropolitan Grill or Union Street Grill (in Seattle),” room for 300 in family dining and room for a couple hundred more customers in a buffet-service restaurant.

Also, the casino will feature a round sports bar for 175 to 200 customers, a circular aquarium, plus administrative offices and a subsidized dining area and free fitness center for the casino’s 1,300 employees. There will be 4,500 parking spaces assigned to the casino, a number that Tulalip officials already doubt will be enough, even though it will be five times as much parking as at the present casino.

Since the Tulalips’ state compact allows only one casino for each tribe, the tribes will use the present casino on Marine View Drive for an enlarged bingo facility, where the original bingo site began in 1982. A business plan is being developed for the present, temporary bingo hall that was built recently at the south end of the Quil Ceda Village business park.

Conference center, shopping, family fun
After the casino and hotels are built, the tribes plan a large conference center designed for events with 1,200 to 2,000 people.

About 1,200 feet from the conference center and casino will be an upscale, 500,000-square-foot factory outlet mall of 120 stores, expected to open early in 2003. Such national retailers as Anne Klein, Banana Republic, Bass, Giorgio Armani, Nautica, Perry Ellis, Polo Ralph Lauren, Mikasa, Tommy Hilfiger and Liz Claiborne have shown interest, Mills said. The Manufacturers’ Outlet Center is projected to attract between 5 million and 8 million visitors a year.

“We’re working on ideas for the space in between the casino and upscale mall where we could have an open-air 1,500-seat amphitheater together with related retail and a varied restaurant experience. A contiguous area could hold a 20-acre water park for family activities,” he said.

The Tulalips also plan a 30,000-square-foot Family Fun Center with go-cart tracks, miniature golf and electronic-game arcades. And an amusement park is on the planning board.

“We have substantial interest from an amusement park developer but it’s much bigger than that (sounds like), more on the order of the Six Flags (amusement park) in Texas. We’re exploring that with those folks now to see how it would work for them and for us,” Mills said.

On the wooded back side of the business park, to the west of the current development, McCoy said KOA has made a presentation to the tribes about an RV-park development where the Boom City fireworks stands were this year, but things are only “penciled in” at this point.

Membrane-technology sewage plant
West of the present bingo hall site, at 88th Street NE and 27th Avenue W., the Tulalips will build the region’s first high-tech waste treatment plant, using a revolutionary membrane technology developed in Japan over the past decade by Kubota Industries.

Tribal members visited an operating membrane plant in England to evaluate the system and came away so impressed they can barely wait to install a similar plant here, McCoy said.

McCoy said the Japanese technology uses large membranes to trap air in the system, allowing more communities of “bugs” to be concentrated for breaking down waste products. The odorless system is so efficient that there is less sludge to dispose of and purer water released than with much larger systems that require more space and maintenance.

“We plan to recycle the water (after it’s processed with chlorine and ultra-violet treatments) into hotel toilets and our water pond displays at the drive-in entry to the casino,” McCoy said. “Since we also want to build a natural gas-fired co-generation plant, we will need a lot of water for that, too, so we will draw it from the Kubota plant and also use the resulting steam to heat the hotels. Then condensed water from the steam will be recycled back through the system again.”

Education and culture
Along with developing Quil Ceda Village, the Tulalip Tribes have been hard at work in other areas, too, creating their own K-12 Heritage School, working through the Marysville School District. The tribes have had the Tulalip Elementary School for years, across the street from the Boys & Girls Club. Now, modules that opened last year provide space for grades six through 12.

“We felt if we could blend our culture into our students’ education, it would go along way toward improving self-esteem and self-respect for Indian children,” McCoy said.

Road to self-sufficiency
The governing body of the Tulalip Tribes is still the tribal council, now chaired by Herman Williams Jr., who is also a Quil Ceda Village Councilman. But the newly formed Quil Ceda Village is the tribes’ move to create their own municipality.

“We didn’t have to create Quil Ceda Village, but sometimes we have trouble getting authorities to understand our tribal government. ... So that’s why we formed the village,” McCoy said, “to give people a structure they all understand, with a village manager and three council members — Stan (Jones Sr.), Herman and past-council Chairman Cal Taylor.”

Jones, Vice Chairman of the Tulalip Tribes, is President of the Quil Ceda Village Council, while Tulalip Tribes Director of Governmental Affairs McCoy is the Quil Ceda Village Manager.

While Quil Ceda Village now has its own government, the tribal council continues to look after the entire reservation.

To help members find work, the tribes have created a Technology Leap program, working with Everett Community College and the University of Washington to train tribal members in the latest technology. Also, the tribes have purchased computers for their members.

“Eventually, we will be installing a double-ring fiber-optic broadband network on the reservation and providing our own telephone, Internet and television services, the whole works. How long it will take to get there I don’t know because that kind of infrastructure costs a lot of money. But it’s a worthwhile goal,” he said. “All this is what we’re heading for — total self-sufficiency and self-government.”

Sales-tax issue
As for the much publicized move to collect the state sales taxes on retail purchases for tribal use, McCoy said the tax issue isn’t understood by most people.

“We’re not asking any business to break any laws. They must remit taxes to Washington state, but we feel we have a claim to a portion of that. We realize some of the surrounding jurisdictions provide services that require that tax support, but we want to negotiate with the state over what those services are and how we can collect a portion of the sales tax for the services we provide,” he said.

The tribes have the authority to tax, but it’s an additive tax, he said, so placing it on top of the state sales tax would be an economic disadvantage.

“We’re providing streets, lights, sewers and services, too, but we don’t get the same sales-tax share as other municipalities,” McCoy said. “The reservation has 10,000 residents, of which only about 2,000 are Native American. Yet all of the residents benefit directly from things we do.”

For more information about the Tulalip Tribes, their culture, environmental issues and business development in Snohomish County, visit their Web site at www.tulaliptribes.net.

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