in nearby Lawrenceburg followed in December. The Caesars project, meanwhile, was continually delayed by environmental concerns and archaeological work. Michigan City's Blue Chip Casino, moored in a channel of Trail Creek where it was built on-site, opened in August 1997. By May 1998, the two Cincinnati-area casinos were reporting strong results, so the commission decided to lift its unofficial moratorium on issuing a fifth license. Casino America, the sole applicant for Crawford County, dropped its bid, leaving just one proposal for the commission to consider, a joint venture of Hollywood Park and Boomtown in Vevay, which it approved in September. Caesars Indiana finally opened in November 1998. After being delayed by damage from a mid-river collision en route to Vevay, the Belterra Casino opened in October 2000. Later developments The Patoka Lake license went unused because the Army Corps of Engineers, which claims ownership of the reservoir, had a regulation against gambling on its property. 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 casino's conversion to a land-based facility was retroactively authorized in 2010. A law passed in 2007 allowed the state's two racetracks, Hoosier Park and Indiana Downs, to install up to 2,000 slot machines each. In 2015, the legislature amended the casino law to allow the state's riverboat casinos to move into land-based facilities on their existing sites, to help them remain competitive with casinos in neighboring states. Tropicana Evansville (formerly Casino Aztar) was the first to take advantage of the new law, opening its land-based facility in 2017. An unintended consequence of legal gaming was the burden on charity gaming by non-profit organizations. Indian casino 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, and its members soon voted to pursue casino gaming as an economic development measure. Discussions focused on sites in Michigan because state officials were more friendly to tribal gaming than those in Indiana, and the tribe had deeper ties to that state. A site in New Buffalo, Michigan, near the Indiana border, was selected in May 1996, but reports that the tribe was considering a casino in South Bend or Elkhart continued to surface. By 2001, the tribe said it had no plans for a casino in