COVID-19 has resulted in delays to building and opening North Bay’s Cascades Casino.

Gateway Casinos’ Director of Communications Rob Mitchell tells BayToday construction has stopped and won’t be starting back up anytime soon.

“Right now we can’t commit to a date to resume construction in North Bay because our primary focus at this time is reopening our 12 existing sites across the province,” he says.

Mitchell tells BayToday they’ve been operating in the red for eight weeks with no revenues coming in.

He says even when those other facilities open there’s a lot of unknowns around what that will look like, pointing to physical distancing, personal protective equipment for staff and more.

“There is so much uncertainty right now it is very difficult to do any kind of cost analysis, looking forward at when we can turn our attention to resuming construction at the site in North Bay,” he says.

Last fall officials said the hope was the local casino would be open in July.

(File photo by station staff)

Filed under: cascades-casino-north-bay, covid-19, gateway-casinos