Land-claim talks end in failure
Apr. 5, 2000

By R. PATRICK CORBETT
Observer-Dispatch

SYRACUSE — The last flicker of hope for an amicable settlement of the Oneida Indian land claim died Tuesday.

After a day of more failed negotiations at the Federal Building, a dejected settlement master Ronald Riccio said, “I ended it. There is really no hope of settling.”

Riccio has mediated the talks for more than a year.

“It is difficult to express the depth of our disappointment,” Oneida County Executive Ralph J. Eannace Jr. said after leaving the bargaining table.

The case now moves to the Syracuse courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Neal P. McCurn. The judge said in March it would be months before the trial starts, and it could take “three or four years” before it ends.

At issue is the Oneida Indian Nation’s claim to some 250,000 acres in Madison and Oneida counties the Nation says was taken wrongfully in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

State and federal negotiators offered the Oneida tribes of New York, Wisconsin and the Thames of Canada $500 million, and the county offered various land concessions to try to settle the claim.

The shift from mediation to litigation will increase tensions among some residents in the claim area, said Leon Koziol, the Utica lawyer who has followed the settlement effort for local landowner groups.

Koziol, who recently resigned from the Upstate Citizens for Equality landowners group, said McCurn must decide whether to include the individual owners of some 20,000 parcels as defendants in the case.

But Scott Peterman, UCE president, said many of the group’s more than 4,000 local members are “glad it’s going to court.” He said they believe the counties have a strong legal case.

The principal players in the negotiations would not say Tuesday if a particular issue or party was to blame for the collapse of the talks.

Koziol said he understands their reticence.

“Settlement talks are always a part of litigation, even during the trial phase,” he said.

Because there is still a chance for a settlement before a jury decides the case, he said, the parties do not want to do anything that might further harden the positions of their opponents.

Oneida Indian Nation spokesman Mark Emery said Nation officials would release a statement today.

“We are extremely disappointed that a compromise could not be reached,” Madison County Board of Supervisors Chairman Rocco DiVeronica said Tuesday.

Perhaps no one was more disappointed than Riccio.

In March, Riccio was ready to call an end to the talks because the parties were getting off track and into “extraneous matters,” he said.

McCurn also was ready to send the case back to court, and he ordered the lawyers into his temporary courtroom in Florida to explain their failure to settle.

But the attorneys said they were “90 percent” in agreement, so the judge relented and gave them until the end of April to work out a deal.

The lawyers told McCurn the key points in the land claim are money, land and issues involving the sovereignty of the Oneidas, with overtones of casino gambling coloring the mix.

Riccio agreed to stay on the job and redouble his efforts to forge a settlement. It was a decision that seemed to mock him Tuesday.

“There was promise it would happen,” he said on his cell phone as he prepared to head home to New Jersey Tuesday night. “I’m very disappointed.”