Tougher rules urged by auditor on the use of casino money to pay for police

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A program using Indian gaming money to help communities reduce problems suffered from casinos is itself plagued with problems that raise questions about whether some of the grants are justified, a state audit concluded Tuesday.

State Auditor Elaine Howle urged the governor and Legislature to consider changing the law to require that counties forfeit money from the Indian Gaming Special Distribution Fund if the committees set up to distribute the grants fail to provide proof that projects are funded in proportion to a casino’s effects.

The program was set up by the state to help communities pay for policing, roads, ambulance responses and other services needed because of a casino’s operation. The auditors said $30 million was allocated among 25 counties in the year they examined. Howle’s auditors looked at a sample of 20 grants totaling $5.7 million and found that in half of them the grant recipient either could not provide evidence of, or could not quantify, the impact of the casino.

‘As a result, they were unable to prove that the funding was in proportion to the impact of a casino, as required by law,’ Howle wrote to the governor. ‘In three other cases, benefit committees awarded grants that were unrelated or disproportionally related to casino impacts, and the Yolo County benefit committee awarded the entirety of its nearly $336,000 allocation to an ineligible entity.’

--Patrick McGreevy