White Earth Band’s Off-Reservation Casino Plans in Limbo Due to Change in Leadership
White Earth Band's Off-Reservation Casino Plans in Limbo Due to Change in Leadership
A tribal election in Minnesota has thrown into doubt a $177 million casino and entertainment complex that the White Earth Nation had been advancing near Moorhead, just east of the North Dakota border.
Jacob McArthur, who defeated incumbent Michael LaRoque in a race for secretary-treasurer, the tribe’s second-highest elected position, campaigned explicitly on concerns about the project and has said he will halt its progress until key financial and community questions are answered. “At this time, I’m going to pump the brakes on this thing,” McArthur told The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. “It’s going to come to a pause until we can answer some of these big questions.”
Chairman Michael Fairbanks, who has publicly supported the project and was not up for reelection, remains in place. The result is a split at the top of White Earth’s leadership at the moment when the project would need to move toward the most complicated phase of its regulatory journey, and McArthur’s position as the tribe’s second-highest official gives him meaningful authority over the financial commitments the project requires.
Three Main Concerns Sit at the Center of McArthur’s Objection
White Earth purchased 296 acres in Clay County in late 2024 for $3.9 million, siting the proposed development at the junction of Interstate 94 and Highway 336 east of Moorhead. The economic and social impact study commissioned by the tribe called for a casino with 950 gaming machines and 10 table games, a 200-room hotel, ballroom and meeting space, restaurants, bars, a gift shop, and an RV park, with 700 projected permanent jobs.
The Fargo-Moorhead market, a regional commercial hub straddling the Minnesota-North Dakota border, has no competing tribal casino within easy driving distance, giving the project a credible geographic rationale.
McArthur’s objections center on three specific concerns: whether the new casino would cannibalize business from White Earth’s existing Shooting Star Casino in Mahnomen, on the reservation, and its smaller operation in Bagley; whether the 700 projected jobs would actually go to White Earth members rather than non-tribal hires; and whether tribal members had any meaningful input on a project whose land purchase and initial development planning moved forward without community consultation.
That last point proved to be a fairly pivotal campaign issue. McArthur said members raised it repeatedly during his race, and his victory over an incumbent who backed the project suggests the concern resonated.
Cannabilization of On-Reservation Casinos is a Serious Concern For Many
The economic impact study concluded that White Earth’s existing casinos “would not experience significant net losses” from a new Moorhead operation. McArthur’s skepticism about that finding is worth taking seriously. The study’s conclusion runs against a well-established pattern in regional gaming economics: a new casino property entering a market typically draws a meaningful share of its player base from the nearest existing operations, particularly when those operations share a brand and ownership structure.
White Earth’s Shooting Star Casino in Mahnomen sits roughly 80 miles northeast of the proposed Moorhead site. That is close enough that the same customer base could plausibly visit either property, depending on convenience. A White Earth-branded casino positioned on I-94 with 950 machines would offer Fargo-Moorhead area visitors a closer option than Mahnomen for the same brand experience. How much of Mahnomen’s traffic that actually captures depends on the modeling assumptions, and economic impact studies commissioned by project proponents tend to be optimistic.
McArthur is not the first person to raise this concern. Minnesota tribes, including the Red Lake Nation and Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, have historically opposed off-reservation White Earth casino proposals, arguing they conflict with the intent of federal Indian gaming policy and risk destabilizing the broader network of reservation-based gaming operations that support tribal economies across the state.
White Earth Would Still Have to Navigate a Federal Hurdle if it Passes Current Opposition
The leadership dispute is the easier of the obstacles the project faces. Off-reservation gaming under IGRA requires a two-part determination from the Interior Department: a finding that the gaming would be in the best interests of the tribe and not detrimental to the surrounding community, and concurrence from the governor of the state in which the gaming will occur. That process is notoriously slow and politically contested, and it has been used to block off-reservation projects for years without ever producing a definitive ruling.
Minnesota governors have historically been reluctant to provide the state concurrence required for off-reservation gaming, and the state’s existing tribal gaming compact structure gives other Minnesota tribes leverage to oppose new off-reservation authorizations that could affect their own markets. White Earth has navigated this terrain before: in 2018, its Business Committee rescinded authorization for an off-reservation casino complex on Star Lake in Otter Tail County after significant community opposition, before the federal process had even been fully engaged. The Moorhead project had advanced further than that one, with land purchased and an economic study completed, but it had not yet entered the formal federal approval process.
McArthur’s pause means it may not get there anytime soon. Whether Chairman Fairbanks can move the project forward over the secretary-treasurer’s objections, or whether the internal disagreement eventually produces a community vote that resolves the question one way or another, will depend on White Earth’s internal governance processes and whether the project’s supporters can address the concerns McArthur raised during his campaign convincingly enough to shift the political dynamic.
For now, $3.9 million worth of Clay County land sits at an I-94 interchange east of Moorhead, awaiting a tribal government that is not currently in agreement on what to do with it.
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