WASHINGTON — Off-reservation casinos face tough new guidelines under a memo released by the Department of the Interior late last week, but the Warm Springs tribe says it is not worried about its proposed gaming site at Cascade Locks.

The memo, issued Thursday by Interior Assistant Secretary Carl Artman, says off-reservation casinos should be rejected if they are too far away from reservations to provide the job benefits sometimes used to justify the facilities. The Warm Springs casino has been stalled for months, waiting for a procedural approval from the Interior Department, and opponents of the Cascade Locks site pointed to the memo as another reason the Warm Springs tribes may be playing a losing hand.

Warm Springs lobbyist Michael Phillips took the opposite view of the memo. On Friday, Phillips noted, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent out letters rejecting 11 of the 30 pending applications for off-reservation casinos, many of which were hundreds of miles from reservations. It rejected another 11 casinos whose applications were deemed incomplete. The Warm Springs proposal was one of the eight remaining proposals.

The Warm Springs tribes have proposed building a $389 million casino and resort on the Columbia Gorge, less than 45 miles away from Portland. The facility would be about 75 miles away from the northern border of the reservation and even closer as the crow flies.

“We’re 37 miles away as the crow flies and right smack dab in the heart of the tribes’ original territory,” Phillips said.

“We believe we are rolling forward.”

On Monday, an Interior Department spokeswoman said there is no timeline for a decision on the Warm Springs proposal. She did not return a call on Tuesday requesting comment on Artman’s memo.

The memo says casinos that aren’t within a “commutable distance” from a reservation should almost always be rejected. Nearly all Warm Springs tribal members would need to commute from the city of Warm Springs, located in the reservation’s southeast corner, about 100 miles from Cascade Locks, noted Michael Lang, conservation director for anti-casino group Friends of the Columbia Gorge.

“I don’t know how many crows the Cascade Locks casino would be employing,” Lang said. “A casino over 100 miles away is not going to help unemployment on the reservation.”

Only one of the casino proposals rejected on Thursday was closer to its reservation than the Cascade Locks casino is to Warm Springs. That proposal, by the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, in Oklahoma, was opposed by local and state officials.

The Warm Springs proposal is backed by Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski and the Cascade Locks City Council, although environmental groups and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde have mounted a fierce campaign against the casino.

If the Warm Springs application gains approval from federal agencies, the casino would be the closest in the state to Oregon’s biggest metro area. Currently, the closest casino to Portland belongs to the Grand Ronde Tribes, who operate the Spirit Mountain Casino, located west of Salem.