- The Scotts Valley Band filed suit Aug. 7 against the Interior Department, Secretary Douglas Burgum and Assistant Secretary William Kirkland.
- The complaint calls the July 30 reversal arbitrary, capricious, contrary to law and unsupported by the administrative record.
- The tribe wants its January 2025 gaming approval restored and its preview casino reopened during litigation.
- The preview casino ran seven days, employed nine tribal members and cost more than $10 million to develop.
The filing puts a $700 million casino project and $10 million in sunk costs before a court that has already faulted Interior’s process once.
VALLEJO, Calif. – The Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians sued the Interior Department in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Aug. 7, asking the court to throw out the department’s July 30 decision that stripped its Vallejo trust land of gaming eligibility and to let its closed preview casino reopen while the case is litigated.
What The Complaint Argues
Three defendants are named: the Department of the Interior, Secretary Douglas Burgum and William Kirkland III, the assistant secretary for Indian affairs. The target is Kirkland’s July 30 reconsideration decision, which found the band “has not established a significant historical connection” to the 160-acre Vallejo parcel and therefore cannot game there under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act’s restored-lands exception.
The tribe contends the reversal is arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law, and that the department ignored guidance from a 2022 federal court ruling in the same dispute. Chairman Shawn Davis has said the administrative record “overwhelmingly supports” the tribe’s gaming eligibility.
The relief sought is total: invalidate the July 30 determination, reinstate the January 2025 eligibility decision that greenlit the project, and allow gaming to resume on the parcel while the case proceeds – undoing the shutdown reported in Scotts Valley’s Vallejo Casino Opened Seven Days Ago.
What Is At Stake In Vallejo
The reversal closed a temporary Class II preview casino that opened July 24 and operated seven days before gaming was suspended. The tribe had hired nine tribal members, trained them at Nevada casinos and spent more than $10 million on the facility – sunk costs that now anchor its argument that the government’s whiplash caused real injury.
Behind the preview site sits the full $700 million plan: an eight-story casino, restaurants, a ballroom, tribal offices, housing and a 45-acre preserve on the Solano County land, all of it dead unless eligibility is restored. That project would be the Bay Area’s closest full-scale casino and one of the largest developments in California gambling, which is why rival tribes with land-based casinos elsewhere in Northern California fought the January approval from the start.
What Happens Next
The case lands in a courtroom that knows it. Judge Trevor McFadden vacated Interior’s March 2025 rescission of the tribe’s gaming determination in October 2025, ruling the department revoked eligibility without adequate notice or a chance to respond, and earlier rounds of this litigation were also fought in the D.C. district. No hearing date has been set on the tribe’s request to reopen the casino.