John Gaccione

Date: 05/10/2021

Subject: Gaming Gamble

From: The Ad Hoc Design Committee

Recently our Kensington Police Department has hired some highly trained police officers from the city of San Pablo. The San Pablo Fire Department has a new fire station with three bays and a host of state-of-the-art equipment. San Pablo also has a new City Hall building as well. 

How does San Pablo manage to do all of that while our sovereign Kensington suffers from a continual financial short fall? Isn’t our sovereign Kensington more affluent and better educated than San Pablo? Doesn’t Kensington have more residents who have been awarded Nobel Laureates than San Pablo for example? 

Never mind the Nobel Laureate count, what makes the big difference is San Pablo is savvy enough to have a tribal gaming casino. The San Pablo Lytton Casino. A virtual money machine that helps make it possible to fund better public services.

For thousands of years the Huchiun band of Ohlone lived here among the steep hillsides, wooded canyons and bayside grasslands. There were large village sites in and around the Wildcat Canyon area. In what is now Kensington, Cerrito Creek provided an abundance of fish swimming upstream to spawn.

A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, on the site of the original Mexican land grant to Maria Castro, the original hacienda near Cerrito Creek was turned into a night club. The club and the adjacent neighborhood in El Cerrito were home to speakeasies, jazz clubs, gambling halls and other pursuits requiring a light hand of the law. 

What better way to acknowledge the long history of indigenous people combined with the local historical presences of gambling than by creating a tribal casino in Kensington. It could solve our financial problems once and for all and be a win/win for everyone.

Sure, there may be a handful of folks who don’t even consider the western section of Kensington as being part of our sovereign village. Too darn close to El Cerrito I am told. God only knows what they would think of a casino in Kensington.

But just think of it, a Huchiun themed casino located in one of Kensington’s mixed-use areas. Or maybe better yet, located up near Summit Reservoir on Grizzly Peak overlooking Wildcat Canyon. Now that would be a winning proposition. Boy howdy!

“You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” (Wayne Gretzky)

Note: A satirical solution to a real problem that doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.