By Harry Esteve

CASCADE LOCKS -- Tourists exiting the freeway rarely look twice at this forlorn timber town squeezed between Interstate 84 and the Columbia River. They keep going across the Bridge of the Gods to the Washington side, where nearby resorts offer golf and upscale pampering.

So it was no big surprise that local officials embraced a proposal by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to build a casino and resort that would rank among the biggest in the Northwest, employ more people than the town's population and attract hundreds of gamblers a day.

"Whether people like it or not, there's money to be made in the casino business," says Roger Freeborn, the city's mayor. "Not only for the tribe, but for the city, the county and the state."

The surprise came later. After spending nearly a decade and millions of dollars on planning, the project has stalled -- and the odds seem to increase by the week that it simply won't happen.

Here's a taste of what's working against it:

Despite getting a pivotal OK by Gov. Ted Kulongoski, the proposal has slammed into a political brick wall in Washington, D.C., where U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne won't budge in his opposition to off-reservation casinos.

An aggressive and well-financed opposition campaign by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, which runs a competing casino outside Salem, shows no sign of letting up.

Recently, the Oregon Department of Transportation warned that a proposed new freeway interchange to serve the casino wouldn't meet state safety standards.

Warm Springs officials insist the project still has momentum. But the delay has caused some former supporters and tribal members to question whether the casino -- touted as a financial salvation for the moribund city and the struggling tribe -- is the right solution.

"My first thought was, 'It's the best thing ever,' " says Larry Cramblett, who was a member of the Cascade Locks City Council that approved the casino project.

He says he saw it as a way to bring badly needed jobs to the depressed community. Now, he's not so sure.

"I just don't know how much of a boost it's going to give us," says Cramblett, who was hanging Christmas lights in his Cascade Locks yard on a recent morning.

An hour's drive away, at the Three Warrior Market on the Warm Springs reservation, Ulysses Suppah shook his head at the idea of moving his tribe's casino to Cascade Locks.

"It should stay here, on the reservation," said Suppah, a cousin to tribal council Chairman Ron Suppah. "I figured if we moved it over there, it wouldn't be ours anymore."

Len Bergstein, a Portland lobbyist and point man for the Warm Springs on the casino, says the tricky legal spadework has been done and incredible potential benefits to the Warm Springs and the city remain.

The proposal "is rarin' to go. It's got a bow around it," Bergstein says. "All we need is a procedural OK."

Proposal dead-ends

The problem is that no one knows when, if ever, that OK will come.

The casino proposal, now in the form of a draft environmental impact statement, lies on Kempthorne's desk. With his pen stroke, the proposal could be whisked out for a final round of public comments. If all went smoothly from there, construction could be under way within 18 months, Bergstein says.

But Kempthorne won't touch it. Not only that, he won't talk about it. He won't return phone calls or answer e-mails from the tribe or the city.

"It's just baffling," says Chuck Daughtry, executive director of the Port of Cascade Locks, which owns the 60 acres of land where the casino would be built. "It's beyond my understanding of how things work in Washington."

Calls to Kempthorne's office were referred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Nedra Darling, a bureau spokeswoman, said the Warm Springs' proposal is "still under review" with no timeline for action.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs lists 34 applications pending for off-reservation casinos around the nation, dating to 1999. One, the St. Regis Mohawks, in New York, has sued the Interior Department to compel Kempthorne to act on its proposal to build a huge casino at a former racetrack not far from New York City.

Supporters of the Cascade Locks casino are watching the New York case closely because it could point the way for future casino decisions. So far, however, there's been no indication of when a decision might come.

Kempthorne's inaction can be linked to his time as governor of Idaho, says Michael Anderson, a Washington, D.C., lobbyist for tribes. There, he stopped a tribe from building a casino 200 miles from its reservation.

The experience "soured him on every gaming proposal," Anderson says. "Sometimes it really comes down to personality."

As more tribes build casinos, opposition to each new one has grown fiercer. Witness the bitter five-year battle that preceded the recent opening of the Three Rivers Casino in Florence. Angry residents tried picketing, lawsuits and more to block the project by the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians.

The tribes prevailed, however, by marching forward under a well-defined federal process that has allowed approximately 400 tribe-owned gambling halls to sprout across the country.

Bergstein says the Warm Springs simply wants the same treatment. "This is an impoverished tribe that has played by the rules every step of the way," he says.

An ideal site

Warm Springs tribal leaders had no delusions of a slam dunk in 1998 when they first started toying with the idea of abandoning their small and not very profitable casino at the remote Kah-Nee-Ta resort in central Oregon and looking for a site closer to a major population center.

Then-Gov. John Kitzhaber made it clear he would approve only one casino per tribe, and it had to be on reservation land. But Kitzhaber wouldn't be governor forever, they knew.

The Cascade Locks site had acres of open, level space and sweeping views of the Columbia -- ideal for the casino-hotel-resort plans the Warm Springs had in mind. Best of all, it lay next to a freeway running directly to Portland, 45 minutes away.

The proposal gained traction when, shortly after his election in 2002, Kulongoski said he would be open to the idea. His reasoning: The Warm Springs could legally build on tribal trust land near Hood River, but that site -- a scenic, forested hillside -- was far less suitable than the abandoned industrial land Cascade Locks was offering.

After cutting a deal with the tribes to get 17 percent of the casino profits for public schools, an exuberant Kulongoski signed the compact. The casino, to be named after the city's famous bridge, looked to be a go.

Opposition then shifted into high gear.

The Grand Ronde, which owns Spirit Mountain Casino, ran a $1 million ad campaign against the Warm Springs proposal. The Grand Ronde's latest budget lists nearly $5 million to fight off-reservation casinos.

Religious groups, tavern owners and environmentalists also teamed up to block a gorge casino. The result has a been a deepening cloud of doubt about the project's future.

"When all the hoopla of the compact came out, it almost sounded like a foregone conclusion," says Michael Lang, conservation director of Friends of the Columbia Gorge. "It's gone from that to an idea that's unlikely to ever happen."

Lang said both the city and the tribe should dust off their Plan B's. For the city, that could be a waterfront housing and commercial development based around the theme of sailboat and yacht racing. For the Warm Springs, it would be a new casino on reservation land closer to U.S. 26.

So far, tribal leaders and other casino supporters are resisting pressure to drop the Cascade Locks proposal. Bergstein says they may have to wait for a new presidential administration.

Meanwhile, Cascade Locks officials look enviously toward the Washington side of the river.

"Everybody loves Stevenson," city Administrator Bernard Seeger says about the more vibrant town that lies on the other side of the Bridge of the Gods. It underwent a revival after Skamania Lodge was built in 1993.

"Nobody loves Cascade Locks," Seeger says. "Nobody wants to live in a town that nobody loves."