OKLAHOMA CITY – The preliminary results of a new study confirm that tribal casinos have a multi-billion dollar impact on Oklahoma’s economy.
Commissioned by the Oklahoma Indian Gaming Association and announced in conjunction with its annual convention and tradeshow, the economic impact study was conducted by Oklahoma City University’s Steven C. Agee Economic Research and Policy Institute.
With more than 38 million visits in 2014 alone, tribal casinos paid out $1.16 billion in wages and benefits to 23,000 employees. Indirectly, the gaming industry supported an additional 14,000 jobs through $580 million in purchases from Oklahoma.
Overall, casinos had an estimated $6.3 billion impact on Oklahoma’s economy in 2014.
“The headline numbers are not at all surprising,” study author and OCU associate director Kyle Dean said.
The study also looked at basic demographic data of the 23,000 jobs directly supported by gaming in 2014. Non-tribal citizens held 60 percent of those positions. Of the remaining 40 percent of jobs held by tribal citizens, 29 percent worked for their own tribes and 11 percent worked for another tribe. Women accounted for 54 percent of the state’s casino employees.
“I get asked all the time how many of these employees are tribal citizens and how many are non-citizens,” Dean said.
“The gaming activities largely occur in rural areas, so not only are these non-tribal employees, but they also tend to be people who live in the local rural area and want to stay in that community. In that sense, the tribes provide a significant source of employment for those people who want to stay in those rural areas.”
Data for the study was supplied through the National Indian Gaming Commission, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and through self-reporting from 80 percent of Oklahoma’s gaming tribes.
Citing a non-disclosure agreement, both Dean and officials with OIGA refused to identify which tribes did not provide data for the study, nor would they state whether there were any patterns among the non-participants. The only identifier given about the participants was that they were mainly tribes that that had already conducted feasibility studies or other research projects with the Agee Center.
