It’s a crime-riddled area and within sight of where one of Fremont County’s 2023 homicides happened. She said the people living around the casino will suffer, and those who struggle with alcoholism and homelessness will only get worse.īrown’s family home is in the Gas Hills neighborhood across the road from the casino, she said. Northern Arapaho Tribal member and educator Mary Brown urged the commission not to approve the license. Thomas argued that the commission shouldn’t hesitate to grant an economic boon to the tribe’s business as it does for other businesses, especially in light of its frequent focus on economic development.įabrizius, however, said he surveyed numerous residents of the reservation, and they all begged him not to approve the license. We say yes right off the bat! ‘Yeah let’s go for it’ … ‘Oh, yes, go ahead.’” “I don’t see this with the other entities (applying for licenses). I don’t know if they’re going to be able to handle that.’ Why is that?” asked Thomas. “When we talk about tribal people it’s always like, ‘I don’t know if I want them to do that.

Thomas, who represents the reservation region and is a member of a non-Wyoming tribe, raised his voice at Fabrizius during the discussion. Fabrizius represents Riverton’s urban district.Ĭommission Chairman Larry Allen and commissioners Jennifer McCarthy, Mike Jones and Clarence Thomas voted in favor of the license. Only one commissioner, Ron Fabrizius, voted against the license approval. The move stripped the state’s Indian tribes of their decade-long monopoly over the industry. Wyoming in recent years has legalized multiple types of gaming.

One of the tribe’s members pleaded with the commission not to approve the license, saying it would exacerbate the high crime rate already plaguing some of the nearby neighborhoods.Įlected officials of the tribe’s executive government branch the Northern Arapaho Business Council, conversely, said alcohol sales are important to helping the casino survive in an increasingly competitive gambling market. The Wind River Hotel and Casino, on the edge of the Wind River Indian Reservation abutting the town of Riverton, now can sell tap or packaged liquor.īut leaders of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, which owns the casino, promised at a Tuesday meeting of the Fremont County Commission that the casino would not sell packaged liquor, except to people staying in the hotel. Fremont County’s government granted a liquor license Tuesday to a business on the Wind River Indian Reservation - a rare concession in a region where alcohol sales have been disallowed historically and no liquor licenses have been issued for at least three decades.

Rivers casino drink policy