KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? The Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma is appealing a decision reached by the National Indian Gaming Commission that prohibits the tribe from operating a casino in the city’s downtown.

The tribe filed its lawsuit in October with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a month after the commission reached its decision. Last week, the gaming commission asked to have the case transferred from Washington to a federal court in Kansas.

Officials in the Kansas attorney general’s office found out Monday about the gaming commission’s decision, which supports the stand it has long taken in the dispute.

“This caught us off guard,” said Whitney Watson, a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Phill Kline. He said the commission’s decision that the tract of tribal-owned land in Kansas City, Kan., does not qualify for American Indian gambling “pretty much says it all.”

The tribe opened its 7th Street Casino in August 2003. In April, when the Indian gaming commission appeared poised to overturn an earlier decision on the land’s reservation status, Kline ordered the casino raided and shut down.

In the raid, the state seized gambling equipment and about $500,000 in cash. The tribe sued in federal court, accusing Kansas of an unlawful breach of tribal sovereignty. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson ruled Kline did not have authority to close the casino, but she said it could not reopen until all other legal issues in the case were resolved.

The tribe has appealed Robinson’s decision to the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Conly Schulte, an attorney for the tribe, said Monday that a mediation hearing in that appeal was set for next month.