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Northern Quest Resort & Casino has evolved from a box-shaped gaming establishment on the outskirts of Airway Heights to a full-service operation with high-end restaurants and a hotel tower. For the last five years, Bremerton, Wash.-born Kent Caputo has overseen it all.
An attorney who developed an expertise in Indian law after serving as counsel to Washington state Gov. Mike Lowry, the 51-year-old Caputo is charged with helping the Kalispel Tribe of Indians expand its business interests beyond Northern Quest.
For the time being, however, the casino complex remains by far the biggest business venture for the small tribe.
We sat down with Caputo earlier this month to discuss his role with the tribe and the industry its serves.
Tell me about the scope of your work as chief operating officer for the Kalispel Tribal Economic Authority.
Kent Caputo: Essentially, it’s the way we divide between the historic, government side of the tribe and the business side of the tribe. You have the Kalispel Tribe of Indians tending to more traditionally government services, and you have the KTEA tending to the business side. Some of the core services, like HR and government relations, are under KTEA for the entire tribe, as a general service to the tribe.
As the chief operating officer, my job is to oversee all of the businesses for the tribe. As well as being chief operating officer, I’m one of the attorneys for the tribe. I’m special counsel. I was their outside counsel in the past, and that’s part of my job now.
If you include all full- and part-time and seasonal employees, I’d say we’re approaching 2,000 employees, headcount. We’ll be at around 1,800 year-round, but we have a lot of people we bring out for the summer concert series and that sort of thing.
What are the tribe’s business interests?
KC: The one that gets the most attention, the largest single business is obviously Northern Quest. We also have branched out with some warehousing efforts and some laundry services.
Fatburger would get the most attention as our outside food service. We have a Fatburger here, and we have it off site. We’ll probably have more of those off site. Beyond that, it’s more things that are on the horizon, hopefully much closer on the horizon.
What you’ll see in the near term and certainly in the longer term from KTEA is more branching into more business diversification.
What are your goals with business diversification?
KC: With any business organization, you don’t want to be too focused in just one area. There’s nothing wrong with anything we do, but in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, who knows what’s going to be happening in the marketplace and where folks’ tastes will lie in terms of what they’re looking for.
We look at it both in terms of what the tribe offers to the community and in terms of the jobs internally and the kinds of career paths we can offer tribal members and others.
How much of KTEA’s revenue is Northern Quest relative to other ventures?
KC: Obviously, if you go to Day One of Northern Quest opening its doors to now, the percentage of pure gaming revenue now compared to then, that percentage is relatively small. Our goal over time would be to have that percentage get smaller and smaller and smaller. Ideally, it will be a growing part of a growing pie.
Facilitywise, you have the hotel expansion that opened at the beginning of 2010, and you had the concert venue that opened in 2012. Last year, you had the rebrand and update to Epic. Do you have any projects planned for the upcoming year?
KC: No specific projects for the upcoming year. Our focus since the Epic rebrand has been much more on continuing service evolution, changes to menus, but the idea of changing a venue or a major renovation at Northern Quest is not in the immediate plans.
What about programs? From a program standpoint, do have any goals or anything coming up?
KC: What you’ll see is the summer concert series getting more and more refined. We’ve had a couple of years to work not only with performers, but also with audiences, with what people want to see. So you’ll see we’ve focused a lot on staffing. We’ve focused a lot on programming. We’ve gotten smarter than this team already was in terms of deciding, how many concerts should there be? What do people want to see? What do they want to do when they’re here?
In this region, the summer is an interesting time. In the summer, people want to get on the golf course. They want to get on the lake. We’re figuring out what people want to do and when they want to do it. We’re trying to do it so they don’t have to choose between, do I get a few hours on the boat or do I go out to Northern Quest and see one of the best bands from the 80s—or whatever it is.
The hotel has been open for three years now. What’s your occupancy rate relative to your expectations?
KC: The hotel has performed exceedingly well, but with what’s gone on with this economy, all of us have suffered. All of us are trying to figure out when this economy is going to allow us to lift up. This is true on the national level.
The hotel project was larger initially, wasn’t it? Then you scaled it back at one point.
KC: Yes, back in ’07, ’08, you have a lot of very smart people telling you, if you build it, they will come. They may well be right, but the reality is, you have to right-size these projects so it makes sense to the size of the overall operation. And there’s a lot that goes into it. How big do you want your gaming floor to be relative to the number of rooms you have? Have much meeting space do you need to have? Do the rooms drive the meeting space or does the meeting space drive the number of rooms?
Our conversations with our owners are taking a look at serving the region and not just what’s going on in this building, but looking at that regional math. What’s going on with the convention center, downtown, and in other areas? How do we accommodate that?
When I came on board, one of the first things I did was right-size this project, and that has been our strategy all along. Right-size our project not just for our property but for what we think is going on around us.
What are some of the trends within the gaming industry?
KC: There are different ways to measure that, and it’s very different what we do compared with what they do in Las Vegas. People are going there. They’re staying for a little while, then they’re leaving.
Our guests, they come here a lot. They may come here a hundred times over a year, not necessarily to gamble, but to dine, to come for a fundraiser, to come for entertainment. So what you may see in Las Vegas, where you’re seeing a lot more very high-end stuff, that’s not what we do.
There are trends you do see that are more universal. People don’t expect to come to a gaming establishment and get cheap food and to sit on a gaming floor all day. Whether it’s Las Vegas or whether it’s here, people are expecting fine dining. With entertainment, it’s not just lounge-lizard entertainment to keep you on a gaming floor. It’s less and less about trying to make all your money in gaming and making sure all the services you provide are high quality. People expect that.
The pressure on us, I would argue, is very high. We have to make sure that if you come to one of these restaurants, you’re going to enjoy some of the best food you’re going to have, whether it’s at Masselow’s and it’s fine dining or it’s a buffet.
Even the term casino is changing. People go to a casino in Las Vegas, but most of the space is dedicated to anything but gambling. I think you’re going to see that here. As we grow, it’s going to be less and less about gambling and more and more about a broader area of hospitality.
What is your position on the Spokane Tribe’s proposal for a casino in Airway Heights?
KC: STEP (Spokane Tribe Economic Project) is complicated. The Kalispel Tribe and its relationship with the Spokane Tribe is familial and positive and caring. We’re talking about two tribes that literally are related by blood, in many cases, or by marriage—and certainly by culture.
It has been and remains very difficult for the Kalispel Tribe to engage in that dialogue because it depends on the question. Does the Kalispel Tribe want the Spokane Tribe to succeed and do everything they can to tend to their members in the community? Of course. Does that mean the Kalispel Tribe is able to support the development of a casino, an off-reservation casino, 2.2 miles away from Northern Quest? The tribe, in its analysis, has been forced to not be supportive of that project in that location.
That’s where the debate has sometimes been confusing. What is the “it” people are talking about? Is the “it” supporting development and growth for the Spokane Tribe? Yes. Do we support off-reservation gaming or gaming generally as an industry? Of course. Do we support this project as proposed? No.
The biggest concern is what happens in this market. We’re not talking about gaming competition at a national level or a regional level. We’re talking about facilities being next door in this marketplace.
We’ll see how this plays out, but the Kalispel Tribe has been pretty clear about its fears of the project’s impact on its people and this establishment.
Take me through your career.
KC: I’ll skip the paper-boy parts. I went to law school at University of Puget Sound and Emory University in Georgia. As an attorney, I started working for the Washington state House of Representatives, and from there, I worked for the governor’s office, then as legal counsel to the governor.
I left government service in January of 1997. My first private-sector job was with a Washington, D.C., firm, so I was back and forth between D.C. and Seattle, trying to help establish a regional office for that firm. I stayed in the private sector until I came here in 2007.
What brought you here?
KC: I love these guys. I worked with a lot of individuals, a lot of businesses, but one of my specialties was working with tribes. I became somewhat of an inadvertent expert in gaming and other tribal issues. I handled a lot of business transactions and legal issues for this and other tribes.
The Kalispel Tribe was then, and remains, very special to me. These are wonderful people and have lived on a small sliver of land between a flood plain and a mountainside with big dreams and even bigger hearts. If you’re motivated to try and establish something, not only Indian gaming but other means to help them become what they want to become, to achieve what they want to achieve for this community, it’s a pretty exciting option.
We started talking about making the transition, rather than spending a lot of time in airports and on aircraft coming to Spokane to give people advice, and it was a pretty inviting call.
Plus, I love this region. Spokane is a really beautiful place. When you start learning what this region really is. Nothing against my hometown, but it’s light gray and it’s dark gray over there. There’s nothing like it for three months out of the year, but the rest of the time, it’s light gray or dark gray. You get over here, and you learn about seasons and all-wheel drive and snow and things like that.
My wife, Marsha, and I have two kids—Joe is a sophomore at Santa Clara and Mandy is a senior in high school at St. George’s School—and they were in middle school when we came over here. I got to spend a lot more time with them. They’ve gotten a great education. From a family standpoint, it’s been great.