[5] Within months of the amendment's passage, Gary mayor Thomas Barnes proposed opening up the economically depressed city to high-rise resort casinos.
[6][7] The Indiana General Assembly rejected a Gary casino bill in 1989,[8] but did assent to a non-binding referendum,[9] which city voters approved by 60 percent.
[11] Gaming companies from Nevada and Atlantic City flocked to join in lobbying efforts to support a second attempt in the 1990 legislative session,[12] but it was blocked by Senate Republican leaders.
[17][18] Brown introduced a Gary casino bill in the 1992 session, but it drew little support due to legislators' aversion to controversy in an election year.
[23] With new backing from Republican entrepreneur Dean White,[24] Brown reintroduced his bill in the 1993 session, with land-based casinos in Gary and French Lick, and riverboats on the Ohio River, and it passed the House,[25] but was again voted down in Senate committee.
[29] After weeks of wrangling, a compromise was reached on a Republican budget with no tax increases, with a few side issues to appease Democrats, including authorization of riverboat casinos.
[45] The commission next visited Evansville, awarding a license to Aztar Corp. in February 1995,[46] and then southeast Indiana in July, where it selected a Hyatt-affiliated project in Rising Sun and a group led by Argosy Gaming and Conseco to build a casino in Lawrenceburg.
[48] Development of the Gary boats was delayed by disputes over the acquisition of land at Buffington Harbor and the withdrawal of President Casinos from its partnership with Barden.
[55] They were initially prevented from leaving dock by the Johnson Act, a federal law prohibiting gambling on U.S. territorial waters such as the Great Lakes.
[60][61] Michigan City's Blue Chip Casino, moored in a channel of Trail Creek where it was built on-site,[62] opened in August 1997.
[64] Casino America, the sole applicant for Crawford County, dropped its bid,[65] leaving just one proposal for the commission to consider, a joint venture of Hollywood Park and Boomtown in Vevay, which it approved in September.
[69] The Patoka Lake license went unused because the Army Corps of Engineers, which claims ownership of the reservoir,[70] had a regulation against gambling on its property.
[71] Legislators in 2003 authorized an eleventh casino to instead be built in a man-made lake in the area of French Lick and West Baden Springs.
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, a tribe historically located in the St. Joseph River Valley of northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan, regained federal recognition in 1994,[78] and its members soon voted to pursue casino gaming as an economic development measure.
[80] A site in New Buffalo, Michigan, near the Indiana border, was selected in May 1996,[81] but reports that the tribe was considering a casino in South Bend or Elkhart continued to surface.