A SLOUGH HUGS the western fence line where state Highway 37 meets Interstate Highway 80 in Vallejo. Egrets work the marsh. On the dry side, there are 160 acres of grass and survey stakes. Two modular trailers sit on the parcel: a gaming hall and a tribal office. There’s a food truck spot too. The Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians calls it a “preview” casino. By year’s end, 100 Class II machines go in. A planned $700 million resort comes later.
On April 14, the Vallejo City Council voted 4-2 to approve a memorandum of understanding providing fire safety services, police, and utilities for the casino site.
On Friday, the Lytton Rancheria, a Sonoma County tribe based in Windsor, sued to stop the city agreement.
The lawsuit, filed in Solano County Superior Court by Mayer Brown LLP and announced Monday, asks the court to throw out Vallejo’s approval of the MOU. Mayor Andrea Sorce was absent for the vote. Councilmembers Alex Matias and Tonia Lediju voted no. Vice Mayor Diosdado Matulac chaired the meeting.
Other tribes have already sued the federal government over whether the Vallejo parcel qualifies for gaming at all. Lytton is the first to sue the city.
The complaint says Vallejo violated the California Environmental Quality Act, the state law known as CEQA; skipped the tribal consultation required by state law before approving projects that could disturb cultural sites; and pushed city services onto trust land outside its limits without sign-off from the Solano Local Agency Formation Commission, the agency that polices when one jurisdiction’s services cross into another in the county.
California law requires environmental review and meaningful tribal consultation before a city takes action like this. None of that has happened.
Andy Mejia, Lytton Rancheria CHAIR
The document the council adopted on April 14 sets out the CEQA finding the suit attacks. The city declared its action “exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act pursuant to CEQA Guidelines Section 15303 and Section 15304,” two categorical exemptions that ordinarily cover routine utility extensions and minor public services work.
The MOU, the resolution says, “merely provides public services to the site of a temporary use of land having negligible or no permanent effects on the environment.”
“The city of Vallejo illegally rammed through this approval,” Lytton chair Andy Mejia said in a statement Monday. “California law requires environmental review and meaningful tribal consultation before a city takes action like this. None of that has happened.”
Asked Monday for the city’s response, Vallejo spokesperson Robert Briseño said the city “does not have any public comment regarding potential or pending litigation.” He provided the MOU and resolution but did not answer further questions.
What the deal looks like on paper
The MOU spells out the financial terms. The Scotts Valley tribe pays Vallejo $402,000 a year: $362,000 to fund “the equivalent of one fully loaded police officer salary,” $27,302 for a portion of an administrative assistant and $12,698 in fees-in-lieu of property taxes. The fees-in-lieu calculation skips the largest of the four trust parcels, the one stretching north of Columbus Parkway toward the I-80 interchange. On top of the $402,000, the tribe pays a one-time $100,000 activation fee in year one and at least $100,000 a year for local Vallejo nonprofits, with the council reserving the authority to direct where that money goes, for a first-year total of $602,000.
The MOU also commits Scotts Valley to install at least one Flock Safety automatic license plate reader and a security camera tower and share the data with Vallejo police, to keep 24/7 private security on site, to charge commercial water rates, and to fill all the potholes on Columbus Parkway between the casino frontage and the Ascot Parkway intersection. Late council amendments added a 15% local hire requirement and a contribution to the cleanup of White Slough.
The first version of the casino is small. The agreement covers a roughly 5,400-square-foot modular building with up to 100 Class II gaming machines. Class II is a federal category that covers bingo and some card games, and tribes don’t need a deal with the state to run it. There’s also a separate 2,700-square-foot modular trailer for tribal offices.
There is no full kitchen, no bar, and no entertainment. Food will come from food trucks. It’ll open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at first, with the option to stay open until 10 p.m. The agreement lasts three years, and either side can walk away for any reason with 90 days’ notice.
The November agreement that came first
The April 14 vote was the second handshake between Vallejo and the Scotts Valley tribe. On Nov. 19, 2024, a different council, with Mayor Robert McConnell presiding, voted 7-0 to authorize a cooperative agreement with the tribe. Matias and Lediju, the dissenters on April 14, were not yet seated.
The agreement, signed by McConnell, tribal chairman Shawn Davis and Patrick Bergin as counsel for the tribe, committed both sides to negotiate a binding “Intergovernmental Agreement” addressing water, sewer, traffic, public safety and “social impacts” the parties listed as “gambling addiction, personal bankruptcies, prostitution, drug addiction, and crime.” The tribe also waived sovereign immunity in the city’s favor for disputes under the agreement, ratified by its General Council.
One line in the recitals matters most. The forthcoming Intergovernmental Agreement, the parties wrote, would provide “binding and enforceable mitigations of the potentially significant environmental effects of the Proposed Project.” Vallejo’s own paper said in November 2024 that the casino has potentially significant environmental effects requiring mitigation. The April 14 MOU finds the services it covers will have “negligible or no permanent effects on the environment” and involve “no environmentally sensitive areas.”
The city used two different CEQA strategies for two related documents. For the November 2024 cooperative agreement, it ruled under Section 15378 that the agreement wasn’t a “project” under state environmental law at all — the broadest exemption available, reserved for actions with no potential to change the physical environment. For the April 14 MOU, it switched: the action is a project, but small enough to fit categorical exemptions for routine utility and public-service work.
The Intergovernmental Agreement promised in November 2024 has not been signed. The April 14 MOU is a smaller, three-year temporary services deal, not the binding mitigation framework the cooperative agreement set up as the next step. Section 6 of the November agreement also pledges the city not to oppose Scotts Valley’s federal trust acquisition, as long as the Intergovernmental Agreement is signed in time.
Two details from the file Lytton will lean on
One section of the MOU automatically suspends the deal if the U.S. Department of the Interior, currently reconsidering whether the Vallejo parcel is eligible for gaming at all, finds it not eligible under the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
That contingency matters because the federal record is unsettled. Interior approved Scotts Valley’s request to put the land into federal trust on Jan. 10, 2025, in the last days of former President Joe Biden’s administration, and ruled the parcel eligible for gaming under a federal exception known as “restored lands” — a path open to tribes whose ancestral lands were taken from them.
New Interior leadership under President Donald Trump undid that approval in April 2025. In October, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden in Washington, D.C., overturned the reversal on due process grounds. Interior had given Scotts Valley no notice. The judge let the agency keep reconsidering, this time by the book. That second look has not closed.
A second detail sits in the MOU: the city’s “Impact Analysis,” the document the mitigation measures rest on, was paid for by Scotts Valley through a reimbursement agreement signed April 1, 2025.
The site plan in the MOU places the temporary casino immediately next to a marked wetland on the western edge of the development boundary. The Section 15304 exemption requires “negligible or no permanent effects on the environment” and that the project “involves no environmentally sensitive areas.” Lytton’s case will turn in part on whether those standards hold against the record.
Lytton’s news release also says the city relied on “a federal environmental analysis it had previously criticized,” a reference to the Interior Department’s environmental assessment for the larger casino project, which the resolution cites as part of its negligible impacts finding. Whether Vallejo had earlier called that assessment inadequate is a question the court record will answer.
A two-front fight, run by the same chair
Lytton, federally recognized and ancestrally tied to Alexander Valley, already runs the San Pablo Lytton Casino, a gaming hall in Contra Costa County that funds more than half the city of San Pablo’s budget. A Vallejo casino 25 miles up I-80 would pull from the same Bay Area customer base. Lytton’s news release points to a federal study projecting the Scotts Valley development would cause “substantial reductions in gaming revenue” at nearby tribal operations.
Mejia, the Lytton tribal chair, is leading a second front closer to Windsor, against the Koi Nation’s proposed Shiloh Resort & Casino on the eastern edge of town with the same legal posture: that other tribes are reservation-shopping for high-revenue Bay Area sites and skipping required reviews on the way.
Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, which runs Cache Creek Casino in Yolo County and is challenging the Vallejo parcel’s federal gaming eligibility in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, opposed the MOU at the April 14 council meeting. On Monday, in a statement from its tribal council, Yocha Dehe said Vallejo’s vote will not “survive judicial review.”
The city “ignored the facts, the law, and sound common sense by rushing into” the MOU while Interior is still reconsidering whether the parcel is gaming-eligible, the statement said. “We are not surprised that impacted parties have chosen to file suit. After all, the city left them no choice.”
Yocha Dehe added that it is “carefully evaluating our options,” language that leaves open the possibility of a separate filing.
What Lytton is asking for
Lytton’s complaint asks the state court to set aside Vallejo’s MOU approval, prohibit the city from providing services under it and require full compliance with CEQA before the city tries again. Mejia said the tribe would still rather settle without a court fight.
Asked for Scotts Valley’s response, Patrick Bergin, counsel for the tribe, replied Tuesday morning.
“This case appears to be about economic competition, not legal principle,” Bergin said. “Lytton has already benefited from the same federal trust land process it now seeks to challenge – effectively attempting to pull the ladder up behind it. Lytton’s own local government agreements governing its trust land expressly recognize exemption from CEQA. This lawsuit disregards well-established law and is designed to delay a lawful agreement with the city of Vallejo. We are confident in the city’s process.”
The two paths differ in the public record. Lytton’s San Pablo casino sits on land Congress put into federal trust through a 2000 act that ordered the Interior Secretary to take the parcel “notwithstanding any other provision of law” and backdated the trust status to before October 17, 1988 — the cutoff date in the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Tribes whose lands sat in trust before that date can game on them without further federal review; tribes acquiring land after must qualify for one of several narrow exceptions, including the “restored lands” exception Scotts Valley is now pursuing through Interior.
Bergin’s CEQA point has documentary footing of a different kind. Lytton’s memorandum of agreement with Sonoma County, covering the tribe’s later trust holdings near Windsor, states that the agreement “should be construed as primarily a government payment and funding mechanism that does not commit the county to make any specific physical changes in the environment.”
That is the same theory Vallejo used in November 2024 to find its cooperative agreement was not a project under CEQA at all. It is not the theory the city used for the April 14 MOU.
Bergin did not address whether Scotts Valley plans to join the Solano County case alongside Vallejo, whether the preview casino’s opening date is affected, or Lytton’s framing of the Vallejo site as “reservation shopping.”