By Carolyn Yeager
Here is the story, as best I can put it together from the record of the Porterville Recorder, of Rodney Martin’s career with the Tule River Indian Tribe and their attempts to have an off-reservation Card Room. I am sorry it has to be so long, but it necessarily has to come from the newspaper reports since I know nothing first hand, of my own accord. I was not there.
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Pictured right: The real Rodney Martin - taken in 2012 and published on his own website, not photo-shopped. Don't blame me.
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Rodney Martin continues to say that he was working with the Tule River Indian Tribe on a consultant basis and was involved in helping work out an Airport Authority agreement between the city of Porterville, Ca and the reservation. Yet in the Porterville Recorder newspaper articles since 2007, Martin comes up mostly in connection with the “card room” project – a gambling venue associated with the Tribe’s on-reservations casino “Eagle Mountain.”
It appears that Martin was always employed in some form of government service, and from there went directly into full-time employment by the Tule River Indians as their administrator in August 2006. That employment appears to have ended sometime around the fall of 2008, if not summer … so he was employed for about two years.
