Colville Tribes Press Pasco Casino Despite Neighboring Tribes' Objections

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation are pressing ahead with plans to build the Tri-Cities' first tribal casino north of Pasco, Washington, even as the federal environmental review lays bare sharp opposition from neighboring tribes. The proposed Colville Tribes Pasco casino would anchor a destination resort on land the tribes control near U.S. Highway 395 in Franklin County, and its march through the Department of the Interior's fee-to-trust process has become one of the most closely watched off-reservation gaming disputes in the Pacific Northwest.

For the Colville, whose reservation sits well to the north in central Washington, the Tri-Cities project represents a bid to plant a gaming and hospitality flag in one of the state's fastest-growing population centers. For the tribes already operating in the surrounding region, it represents something closer to an incursion. The result is a proceeding that tests not only the mechanics of taking land into trust for gaming but also the unwritten norms that have long governed how tribes treat one another's markets.

A destination resort on the Columbia Basin

As described in the federal review, the proposal is ambitious. Plans call for a casino floor of roughly 70,500 square feet housing on the order of 2,000 slot machines and about 30 table games, paired with an eight-story hotel of some 200 rooms. The development would add restaurants, an event center and parking for more than 1,500 vehicles, positioning it as a regional draw rather than a roadside slots hall. The site near Highway 395 offers the highway visibility and population base that operators prize, and the Tri-Cities — Pasco, Kennewick and Richland — currently have no casino of their own.

The Colville already run gaming on their reservation, and a Tri-Cities property would extend the tribes' reach into a market more than a hundred miles from their home land base. That distance is precisely what makes the project legally and politically delicate, because gaming on land acquired after 1988 generally faces additional federal hurdles. Readers tracking how these projects clear review can consult our Legal Guide to IGRA and Class III gaming and the broader Washington state gaming hub for context on the state's compacting landscape.

The economic case the Colville advance is familiar to anyone who has followed reservation gaming. The tribes describe the resort as a generator of construction jobs, permanent employment and operating revenue that would flow into government programs for their members, many of whom live far from the wage economies of the state's urban corridors. A property in a growing metro area, the argument goes, diversifies the tribes' income away from their existing reservation operations and hedges against the slow demographic decline of more rural gaming markets. Those are the same arguments that have driven a national push toward better-located venues, and they are not easily dismissed.

Neighboring tribes raise treaty and market concerns

The proposal has exposed unusual acrimony between the Colville and two of the region's established gaming tribes, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Both contend that a Colville casino in Pasco would intrude on their treaty-protected interests and siphon away patrons who now visit their own properties. Their objection rests on a principle that has guided tribal gaming for decades: that casinos sit on a tribe's own reservation, serving the area historically tied to that nation.

Opponents argue that allowing a tribe to open a casino far from its reservation, in the heart of another nation's customary territory, would unsettle the precedent that has kept tribal gaming markets largely separate and predictable.

Supporters of the Colville project counter that the tribes hold a legitimate connection to the Columbia Basin and that economic opportunity should not be frozen by the accident of where a reservation boundary was drawn. The dispute illustrates how off-reservation expansion increasingly pits tribe against tribe rather than tribe against state, a dynamic explored in our analysis of the 2026 off-reservation gaming wave.

The federal review ahead

Because the Pasco parcel would be newly placed into trust for gaming, the project must satisfy the layered requirements that govern gaming on after-acquired lands. That typically means an environmental impact statement, a determination by the Secretary of the Interior that gaming would benefit the tribe without being detrimental to the surrounding community, and — under the most demanding pathway — concurrence from the governor of the state. Each step invites comment, and the objections of nearby tribes become part of the record the Interior Department must weigh. The framework is detailed in our explainer on land-into-trust and IGRA Section 20 eligibility.

A setback in the release of a key federal report slowed the timeline, but the Colville have signaled they intend to continue. How the Interior Department reconciles the Colville's economic case with the treaty and market arguments of its neighbors will shape not just one casino in Franklin County but the wider question of how far a tribe may travel from home to game. For now, the Tri-Cities project remains a proposal — one whose outcome both supporters and opponents see as setting precedent for the next generation of off-reservation gaming in the West.