Casino White Cloud to open in Kansas

Kansas' fourth casino - and the region's 38th - opens at 5 p.m. Wednesday just west of White Cloud in Brown County.

Owned by the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, the reservation casino will be managed by a firm headed by St. Joseph businessman William M. Grace.

Grace also owns the St. Jo Frontier riverboat casino in St. Joseph, and he is in the process of purchasing The Woodlands race track in Kansas City, Kan., through federal bankruptcy court. Grace also is building a lake-based floating casino near Osceola, Iowa.

"It'll work," Grace said of the Iowa tribe's casino, despite a growing number of regional competitors, himself included.

Grace said he was among the skeptics who scoffed when the Kickapoo Nation opened Kansas' first tribal casino near Horton in 1996.

Now he is a believer, Grace said, after two years of watching crowds of gamblers flock to that tribal gaming facility and two others southwest of White Cloud.

Being the northernmost of the four Kansas casinos, Grace said, the Casino White Cloud will have a marketing edge in drawing players from southern Nebraska and northeast Missouri.

At the outset, the new casino will offer 146 slot machines and other electronic gaming devices, plus high-stakes bingo in the tribe's 15,000-square-foot bingo hall. By fall, a 10,000-square-foot addition will boost the machine count to 350 and also provide room for table games, a bar and a buffet restaurant.

White Cloud is on Kansas 7, a few miles south of the Nebraska state line.

Casino White Cloud will become the 38th riverboat-, reservation- or racetrack-based casino in the four-state region of Missouri, Kansas, Illinois and Iowa.