Catawba Tribe Plans Aggressive Casino Expansion in North Carolina as Lumbee Sits Out
Catawba Indian Nation Chief Brian Harris announced Wednesday that the tribe plans to build two additional casinos in North Carolina.
The announcement was made at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening phase of the Catawba Two Kings Casino Resort in Kings Mountain. Sites have already been selected, though Harris declined to identify them publicly. “It’s all about negotiations,” he said. “When we come to a deal, we’ll make an announcement.” He framed the tribe’s broader ambitions simply: “We got two more casinos to build in this state, and hot dammit, we’re going to build them.”
The announcement came just days after the Lumbee Tribe voted 63% against a constitutional amendment that would have given tribal leadership the authority to pursue gaming without a full membership referendum, effectively ending the tribe’s most recent attempt to build a casino along the Interstate 95 corridor in Robeson County. The contrast between the two tribes’ trajectories could not be more pronounced.
The Catawaba Continue to Build and They See a Bright Future
The Two Kings Casino Resort opened its introductory casino phase in May at the Kings Mountain site off Interstate 85, roughly 35 miles west of Charlotte. The introductory phase includes 1,350 slot machines, 22 live-dealer table games, electronic table games, and sports-betting kiosks. The sixth floor of the full resort, still under construction, will eventually house the main casino floor with 11 bars and nine restaurants. The completed resort is projected to include 4,300 slot machines, 100 table games, and a 400-room hotel, with a total investment of $1.25 billion. The second phase is targeted for spring 2027. Two Kings has also been busy creating strategic partnerships with local organizations, including the Carolina Panthers of the NFL.
Harris credited the Trump administration for helping secure approval of the project, and Donald Trump Jr. attended the 2024 groundbreaking ceremony. The political relationships that smoothed the Catawba’s path through federal approval have been a consistent theme in the tribe’s casino development narrative, reflecting how central the Interior Department’s land-into-trust decisions are to any tribe’s ability to open a casino in the first place.
For Harris, the economic stakes are both personal and communal. “Some people see slot machines,” he told the crowd of tribal members. “I see executives. I see scholarships. And I see health care. I see homes. Now, we’re in control of our destiny.”
The Catawba and Lumbee Tribes: Different Paths to the Same Goal
The juxtaposition with the Lumbee vote is worth dwelling on because the two tribes represent opposite approaches to the same underlying challenge of building gaming economic development from a position of limited prior infrastructure.
The Catawba are a South Carolina-based tribe with federal recognition dating to 1993, which gave them access to IGRA’s gaming framework and the ability to pursue land-into-trust applications in neighboring states. Their Kings Mountain project navigated a federal approval process that took years and required political support at multiple levels, but once that approval came, the tribe had clear authority to proceed. Internal governance questions were resolved before ground was broken, not after.
The Lumbee, by contrast, only received full federal recognition in December 2024, making this their first opportunity to access gaming rights under IGRA. But the vote they just lost was not primarily about gaming. It was about governance: tribal leadership wanted to remove the constitutional requirement for a broad membership referendum before pursuing gaming, concentrating that authority in the chairman and council instead. The membership declined to grant that authority, and chairman John Lowery announced the casino plans were dead for the duration of his term. Lumping those two together backfired for tribal leadership.
As we noted in our coverage of that vote, the Lumbees’ existing constitution already provides a pathway for gaming, requiring a referendum with 30% voter turnout. The vote was not a permanent closing of the door. It was a statement about who gets to make the decision, and they’ll have to wait just over a year until a new chairman is in charge before they can have the discussion again.
North Carolina’s Tribal Gaming Landscape Is Shifting, and Quickly
The Catawba’s expansion plans, if executed, would significantly reshape the tribal gaming map in North Carolina. The state currently has three tribal casinos: the two Harrah’s Cherokee properties operated by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the western mountains, and the Two Kings Casino, now opening in Kings Mountain. Two additional Catawba properties would bring the total to five, spread across different geographic markets in a state that legalized mobile sports betting in 2023 and has been steadily expanding its regulated gaming footprint.
The Cherokee have been building their own expansion concurrently. Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino and Hotel is nearing completion of a $275 million expansion that adds a 12-story hotel tower and new dining options. The eastern part of North Carolina, including the Robeson County market that the Lumbee had targeted, remains without a tribal casino. Whether that gap eventually gets filled by a future Lumbee vote, a Catawba expansion into eastern markets, or remains open territory depends on decisions that have not yet been made.
What the Catawba announcement makes clear is that the tribe’s appetite for expansion is not satisfied by Kings Mountain. Harris’s willingness to announce two additional planned properties before the first has even completed its second phase reflects a level of institutional confidence that comes from having already navigated the hardest part of the federal authorization process once. The Catawba know what it takes to get a casino built in North Carolina, and now it appears they are planning to do it twice more. Whether this motivates the Lumbee to organize and coordinate to achieve casino approval in its next vote remains to be seen, but it appears the clock is ticking in North Carolina.
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