California State University of San Bernardino
Team Members: Jonathan R. Kuhn, Brian B. Lee, Andrea M. Scott Advisor:
Chris Naticchia Executive Summary On March 2, 2004, voters in the city of Hesperia, California went to the polls to decide a referendum on the presence of a casino built on land ceded to a local Native American tribe called the Timbisha Shoshone. The measure, needing a simple majority, passed easily with 58.77% in favor of the Municipal Service Agreement, land cession, and the presence of the casino to be built on 54 acres in a prime location. This event represented not only the culmination of important and diverging interests in the city itself, but also a chain of events that calls into question the motivations of the principal actors from city government and the civil society to the tribe and developers who sponsored the initiative. As a part
of this analysis, we developed five major problems that are key
in determining the ethical context of the city’s actions:
1) the land and environmental impact, 2) the presence of a casino
and its impact on municipalities and people, 3) the business/economic
impact of this specially designated business, 4) the agency relationship
and the city’s fiduciary duty, and 5) the issue of tribal
sovereignty. When the problems presented by these ethical issues
are ranked in the context of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs, they present a difficult but soluble dilemma for gauging
the impact on the citizens and generating solutions. Our resulting
conclusion is that there are, in fact, other avenues that the
city could have pursued that would have provided more adequate
ethical solutions to the problems generated by these activities
and that, in its haste to pursue one most profitable course of
action, the city failed to adequately present such alternatives
to its citizens.
Cases/Surveys
| Discussion
| Toolbox
| Case
Competition | Store
| Links |
|||
