CATTARAUGUS TERRITORY, N.Y. — Two weeks before the Seneca Nation’s Sept. 18 caucus, the argument over who lost the gaming compact with New York has moved from Council chambers onto the campaign trail.
Robert Jones, a former Cattaraugus councilor and a persistent voice in the Nation’s public comment threads, has begun telling members that the long stall with Albany is not simply Governor Kathy Hochul’s doing. In the telling now circulating ahead of the Nov. 3 election, blame also belongs at home — and specifically with Todd Gates, the former president who sits again on Council and has lined up behind Odie Porter’s bid for the presidency.
Gates has not answered that charge in a public statement. What is not in dispute is the wreckage: more than two years after a 20-year framework deal collapsed in the State Assembly, the Nation still has no durable compact for the three casinos that underwrite its government. President J. Conrad Seneca has called the state’s handling “disrespectful.”
Albany says it is negotiating in good faith.
Members, facing another two-year election, want a name.
A compact that never quite ended
The 2002 Nation-State Gaming Compact let the Senecas build Class III casinos in Niagara Falls, Salamanca and downtown Buffalo in exchange for exclusivity west of State Route 14 and a steep share of slot revenue — 25 percent in the later years, among the highest rates paid by any tribe in the country. The Nation has sent more than $1 billion to the state. Cities and counties came to depend on the pass-through. So did Seneca programs.
The fight over what the paper actually said has defined a generation of Seneca politics.
In 2017, Gates, then president, stood in the Cattaraugus Council chambers and declared the 14-year revenue-share clock finished. “The text of the compact contains absolutely no requirement for payments beyond those three payment periods,” he said. “Nor does it set a rate at which any such additional payments would be made.” The Department of the Interior had already written that the payment obligation ended with the initial term. New York sued. The Nation litigated. Payments stopped, then were forced, then became the wound that still has not closed.
Gates’s defenders call that period a defense of the document and of sovereignty. His critics, Jones among them in the current telling, call it the opening move in a decade of legal and political isolation that left the Nation with casinos still running and no successor deal.
The more immediate “debacle,” as members now use the word, is newer.
In June 2023, under President Rickey L. Armstrong Sr., the Nation and the Hochul administration announced an agreement in principle on a new 20-year compact. Details were scarce. Then they leaked: a lower slot rate, and a fourth casino in or near Rochester. Rochester-area Assembly members, who had not been told, killed the authorizing bill. The window closed. A short-term extension kept the lights on. Formal talks have sputtered ever since.
President Seneca, elected in 2024 and not a party to that term sheet, has tried to reset the table with what he calls a “people’s compact,” assembled from community meetings. In October 2025 he said a draft sent to the governor’s office was “basically trashed.” He has said he has not sat with Ms. Hochul on the compact since last summer.
“If we have patience, we have a commitment and a process to follow, we can get it done and we will,” he said after the governor’s May 2025 apology visit to Cattaraugus — a visit that repaired some ceremony and none of the math.
That is the record. The campaign argument is about which Seneca official owns how much of it.
The field, and the compact as a wedge
The Nation’s constitution rotates the presidency every two years between Cattaraugus and Allegany and forbids consecutive presidential terms. Councilors serve staggered four-year terms, eight from each territory. The caucus on Sept. 18 is where slates are blessed. The general election is Nov. 3.
The announced executive field is already a referendum on the last two years.
Ms. Porter, a four-year councilor and vice chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, opened her campaign with a five-point plan that begins, “secure the nation’s economic future,” and ends with unfinished business that includes the Thruway fight. President Seneca and Gates both endorsed her. Tina Abrams, also a sitting councilor and recently honored at the State Senate as the 57th District’s Woman of Distinction, announced the same day and is running as a voice of the people rather than of the outgoing executive suite. Mr. Seneca is not leaving the building; he is running for treasurer, a post he held nearly three decades ago.
Council races will absorb the compact fight even if the presidential headlines do not. Gates, appointed back to the Cattaraugus Council after Mr. Seneca vacated his seat for the presidency, is both an incumbent power and a symbol of the 2017 payment stoppage. Armstrong is back on the Allegany Council after his presidency. Kevin W. Seneca, a former treasurer and former chairman of Seneca Gaming Corporation, returned to Council in the last cycle. The people who sat over the casinos are on the same ballot as the people who say the casinos no longer pay for the government members expect.
Jones’s intervention is useful to challengers precisely because it personalizes a file that is otherwise all term sheets and Albany procedure. If the compact failed because Gates chose litigation over a deal in 2017, then the Porter-Seneca-Gates alignment looks like continuity. If it failed because Armstrong and Hochul hid a Rochester casino from the Legislature in 2023, then the last presidency is the problem and Gates is a bystander with a long memory. If it failed because Ms. Hochul’s office will not put “decision-makers, not career bureaucrats,” at the table — President Seneca’s phrase — then the election cannot fix Albany and can only decide who is trusted to keep walking in.
Those are the barbs. They travel faster than compact language.
What tribal members are actually arguing
On the Nation’s official Facebook page and in the comment threads that function as a second Council, the compact is rarely debated as Indian Gaming Regulatory Act doctrine. It is debated as paychecks, exclusivity and respect.
The casinos still operate. Seneca Niagara is starting a $47 million hotel renovation — which has rubbed some members of the Tribe the wrong way, wondering why renovations rather than expansions? Seneca Gaming Corporation’s chief operating officer has told industry gatherings that New York iGaming is coming and the Nation is preparing for it. None of that is a compact. A compact is the legal floor under exclusivity, sports betting, online games and whatever share, if any, still goes to Albany. Without it, every expansion is a wager.
Ms. Porter cannot run on “secure the economic future” without saying what share she would pay and what she would demand for it. Ms. Abrams cannot run as the candidate of members’ voices without saying whether she would have killed the Rochester term sheet or sold it harder. Mr. Seneca, asking to be treasurer, will be judged on whether the “people’s compact” was a governing method or a campaign brochure.
Gates, if he seeks another Council term or remains the quiet partner in Porter’s coalition, will be judged on 2017 and on 2023 by association.
Jones’s accusation — that Gates owns the debacle — will not be settled by a filing in federal court. It will be settled, if at all, by enrolled voters who have lived with the same three casinos, the same unfinished paper and a rotating cast of officials who each insist the last person to hold the pen is the one who dropped it.
The caucus is Sept. 18. Albany is not on the ballot. The compact is.
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