The proposed Cedars at Bear Creek casino, planned along Highway 99 on land where Roxy Ann Lanes sits, would house 650 gaming machines but no table games such as blackjack, poker or dice.

The final Environmental Impact Statement for a proposed gambling facility in Medford was released last week, kicking off a public comment period ending Dec. 23 on what would be Oregon’s first off-reservation tribal gaming center.

The final draft issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs last Friday includes comprehensive reviews of 111 comment letters and 81 public comments in response to an earlier draft of the environmental review as part of the Coquille Tribe’s efforts to convert 2.4 acres of property in south Medford into a Class II tribal gaming facility. The property is located at the site of the former Roxy Ann Lanes, which closed in late May on South Pacific Highway because of structural concerns.

The proposed Cedars at Bear Creek in Medford would be built in three phases: Phase I would involve 150 gambling machines; Phase II would add up to 300 machines; and a final phase to include up to 650 machines, according to information from the Coquille Tribe cited in the report.

A request for comment from Tribal One, the Professional Services Group owned by the Coquille Indian Tribe, was not immediately returned Monday.

The project has garnered resistance from tribes in Southern Oregon and Northern California that fear the Medford gaming facility will divert people from their casinos on tribal lands.

The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, in a release Friday stated that tribal leaders voiced “deep frustration” with the process and voiced a commitment to keep fighting. The Cow Creek Tribe is among four tribes in the region opposed to the project, according to an earlier news report, with Cow Creek and the Karuk Tribe, Elk Valley Rancheria and the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation sending a letter earlier this year asking U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to hear their concerns and stop the project from moving forward.

“The Biden Administration and Secretary Haaland’s legacy for Indian Country will be cast with this cloud if they continue to allow some Tribes to play by their own rules while other Tribes are left behind,” Cow Creek Umpqua Tribal Chair Carla Keene said in the Friday release.

The Cow Creek Tribe says its among 30 tribes around the country “fighting to be heard by the Biden Administration and Secretary Haaland about the devastating impacts that mass off-reservation casino approvals will have on Indian Country,” according to the release.

Cow Creek, which operates Seven Feathers Casino Resort in Canyonville roughly 70 miles north of Medford, estimated in a February 2023 report it conducted with Meister Economic Consulting of Rancho Mission Viejo, California, and Pyramid Associates of Edinburg, Texas, that Seven Feathers would lose approximately 28.5% of its gross gaming revenues and 52.2% of non-gaming revenue such as hotel revenue and food and beverage sales if the new Medford casino is approved.

The final EIS includes master responses to tribes’ concerns. It anticipates that the “substitution effects” of traffic visiting the Medford facility in lieu of other casinos will diminish “after the first year of the project operations” — once people experience Medford’s casino and “gradually return to more typical and more diverse spending patterns.”

“While the contemplated gaming revenue impacts illustrated in the competitive effects study would have impacts on other gaming operations, multiple casinos across the U.S., including facilities similar in size to the Karuk and Cow Creek facilities, have undergone similar gaming revenue impacts due to increased competition and remain open and profitable,” the BIA report states.

The report suggests “management practices” such as “staffing changes to relevant departments” to keep competing facilities open, along with “revised player reinvestment and marketing strategies.”

The final draft is the latest development in a project going back more than a decade, when the Coquille Indian Tribe — which also operates The Mill Casino in North Bend — bought a tract of land that included Roxy Ann Lanes and the old Kim’s Restaurant in 2012.

The BIA issued a Notice of Intent related to the project in January 2015, a formal scoping report the following June, but the project was halted during the Trump administration with a notice of cancellation of the Environmental Impact Statement published in the federal register on Sept. 3, 2020. The cancellation was later withdrawn during the Biden administration the following year.

The BIA will issue a Record of Decision on or after the public comment period ends on the final Environmental Impact Statement on Dec. 23, 2024. People can send public comments by email to Tobiah Mogavero, NEPA Coordinator at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, at tobiah.mogavero@bia.gov. Use “FEIS Comments, Coquille Indian Tribe Fee-to-Trust and Casino Project” in the subject line.

Those with comments may also send them by mail to: Regional Director, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Northwest Region, 911 NE 11th Ave., Portland, OR 97232-4169. The BIA asks those commenting by mail to include on the first page their name, return address and the caption “FEIS Comments, Coquille Indian Tribe Fee-to-Trust and Casino Project”.

For more information and a link to the Final Environmental Impact Statement, see coquille-eis.com.