On June 16, 2025, WilmerHale secured a significant victory for the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians and its former and current leaders when a California court dismissed a lawsuit that accused them of fraudulently misrepresenting the Tribe’s federally protected right to its reservation land.
The lawsuit—filed by local businessman Steve Pappas in California Superior Court for the County of Santa Barbara—was the latest in a series of legal efforts aimed at undermining the Tribe’s right to its reservation land and reversing the expansion of the Chumash Casino Resort. The Court’s dismissal of the lawsuit warded off an assault on the Tribe’s sovereignty and the legal protections afforded to tribal lands held in trust by the federal government.
The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians, who once controlled more than 7,000 square miles of land in California, now resides on a 2.5-square-mile reservation in the Santa Ynez Valley. For nearly a century, the Tribe’s reservation land has been held in trust by the United States government.
In 2003, the Tribe opened the Chumash Casino Resort. It soon became a major economic force in the region, prompting a major expansion just over a decade later.
Pappas has attempted to stop the casino’s growth for the last ten years, challenging the foundation of the Tribe’s claim to the land. He has argued that, despite the reservation’s nearly 100-year history, the land was never properly placed in the trust of the federal government and therefore does not in any real sense belong to the Tribe.
On this basis, he has claimed that the Tribe should not be allowed to operate its casino, claim tax exemptions available to federally recognized tribes, or access certain water rights—a near-existential threat to the Tribe’s sovereignty and economic future.
Pappas’ first lawsuit, filed in 2015, sought to block the casino expansion. Later that year, he filed a second suit attempting to intervene in a 1906 California court case that had confirmed the Tribe’s land was set aside for the Tribe. In 2019, he filed a third lawsuit under the California False Claims Act, accusing the Tribe and its leaders of making false statements about the land’s legal status.
Each of those cases was dismissed before reaching trial, primarily because the federal government and the Tribe are both essential parties to any lawsuit challenging the status of land the United States holds in trust for federally recognized tribes. WilmerHale contended the lawsuits could not, in fairness, go forward without them.
The most recent case, filed by Pappas in 2024 under the California False Claims Act, alleged that tribal leaders falsely stated that the land was held in trust by the US government. He apparently attempted to avoid the sovereign-immunity issue by seeking only monetary damages and by suing not the Tribe itself, but only individual tribal leaders—Kenneth Kahn and Vincent Armenta, the current and former Chairs of the Tribe, respectively, and John Elliott, current CEO of Chumash Enterprises, a corporation operated by the Tribe.
In its decision, the Court agreed with WilmerHale’s position that the lawsuit could not proceed without the United States as a party: To assess Pappas’ claims, the Court would need to evaluate whether it was false for Kahn, Armenta and Elliott to assert the Tribe’s land was held in trust by the United States for the Tribe’s benefit.
The WilmerHale team was led by Matt Benedetto, who has successfully defended the Tribe against all of Pappas’s lawsuits over the past decade, and Sam McHale. The team was supported by Jill Folsom and the Managing Attorney’s Office, as well as Matt Howard and Armani Veltman-Smith.