Buffalo Indigenous games in jeopardy

Page 13

The decision to cancel or not to cancel the 2005 North American Indigenous Games (NAIG) was set to be made by the games' governing council on April 23, two days after Windspeaker's publication deadline.

Although the bid committee had made its recommendation to the full NAIG Council during a conference call on April 20, council President Harold Joseph said he could not disclose what decision had been made until after the April 23 meeting.

The council rescinded the hosting rights that had been awarded to the Buffalo Sports Society (BSS) on March 26. Joseph said NAIG was considering three options. It will either go with another host in Buffalo for 2005, setting strict guidelines for operation, including a requirement that the new host post a performance bond of $1 million, or NAIG will open the bidding back up and have the games in 2006. The final alternative is to take the loss of the games and focus on 2008.

"The games were taken away from the Buffalo Sports Society because of lack of documentation, actually," said Joseph during a phone interview from his office on April 16. "In the bid process for the North American Indigenous Games, there's a process that you have to go through. If you bid, you get a bid package from the council. In it, it states exactly what you need for a bid. You have to put up so much money to make a bid, non-refundable. And then you have a deadline for when you have to have your package in."

In the 14-year history of the games, Canadian cities have fared best when it came to playing host. The last U.S. attempt to host the games in Fargo, N.D. in 2000, was unsuccessful. While the games are supposed to be held every three years, alternating between Canadian and U.S. locations, the Fargo failure meant there was a five-year gap between the 1997 games in Victoria, B.C. and the Winnipeg games in 2002.

With the last two Canadian hosted games considered major successes, the pressure was on the U.S. tribes to come up with a winning entry. Four bid packages were submitted in 2001 for the 2005 games. Eventually, the field was narrowed to Oklahoma and Buffalo, New York.

"The initial $1,000 that everyone put up to be in the running, everybody put that money up. Then when it came time to get your package in, I think it ended up only being two-Buffalo and Oklahoma," said Joseph. "When it came time to do presentations to the council, New York was the only one that was still in the running. So it was sort of a unanimous decision."

That presentation by BSS to the NAIG council was made in Saskatoon in 2002 and the society was awarded the games.

Thousands of athletes and cultural participants are attracted from across North America to the games, and hosting the event requires extensive planning and no small amount of organization. The NAIG council spelled out what it required of the successful bidder. It did so by setting a series of deadlines for the creation of organizational charts, a business plan, letters of intent for transportation, housing athletes, cultural villages, support from Native communities in the state and from government officials at the city, state and federal level. Commitments for corporate sponsorship and concrete marketing plans were also required.

"When the first deadline came [BSS] had some of that stuff," Joseph told Windspeaker. "They were supposed to have $1 million in bank and they didn't have, but they had a promissory note from a Native-owned bank in New York."

The council allowed the process to continue.

"We let that deadline pass and then the next deadline came and went," he said. "In December, the council came up with an [memorandum of understanding] with BSS that they had to have these eight action items done by early February. That deadline was getting close and they weren't getting close to it. They asked for an extension. We extended it out to March 2. At that time, we got a letter from BSS that if we pulled the games away from them thy'd go into litigation for money that they lost. When March 2 came and they were supposed to have all that stuff, well, we hired an attorney and she faithfully went to the lawyer for BSS and started negotiating with them, getting all that information to us. Well, when it came time for them to give us the information, BSS actually came back saying they wanted a letter signed by each member of NAIG council saying that we wouldn't discuss any of the materials that they would give us. None of the council members was going to agree to that. We ended up taking the hosting rights away on that basis. But that was just taking the hosting rights away from that group, not taking the games away from Buffalo for 2005."

Guy Patterson did most of the legwork for BSS. He said his board asked the NAIG council to not release any of the information BSS was providing because it was worried that a former member of the organization who was fired might try to use their information to submit a competing bid.

"We did all of the work," he told Windspeaker on April 20. "We didn't want the NAIG council to be giving that information to people that we have terminated."

Patterson said the NAIG council has to share in some of the blame for the paperwork being late, that documents he requested from the council arrived late or in a form that did not meet the requirements of New York State law. He said BSS will seek a court injunction to prevent any other group from hosting the games in Buffalo or anywhere else in the United States "in the next three to six years."

Rumors have been circulating that BSS has been the subject of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Joseph said he's heard the rumors, checked them out and found them to be untrue.

"What I know about a FBI investigation into BSS, it's completely false. The Seneca Nation who was backing BSS, that's where all the money came from for all the sponsorship. There were two major tribes in the state of Connecticutthat were waiting for BSS to get everything together and they were going to donate a considerable amount of money-the Pequot and Mohegan tribes," he said.

Patterson also said he had checked and there is no FBI investigation. He suggests the rumor could have been started by disgruntled former employees.

Patterson maintains that everything BSS did or proposed to do in the organization of the 2005 games was legal in New York, including the plan to have BSS board members run the games and pay themselves to do so. NAIG council saw that as a conflict of interest.

Patterson said the general manager of the Victoria games was paid $75,000 while the Winnipeg games' manager earned around $60,000. The salaries contemplated by BSS were in that range and local lawyers had advised BSS that the plan was not considered a conflict under state law.

Patterson plans to appeal to Joseph and the NAIG board to reconsider their decision to pull their hosting right one last time in the near future.