By Bloodhorse.com
DEL MAR, Calif. (Nov. 17, 2016) –A nearly sixth-month dispute over Northern California’s 2017 racing schedule was resolved Nov. 17 during a California Horse Racing Board meeting at Del Mar.
CHRB members, at the regularly scheduled monthly meeting, approved a schedule recommended by the regulatory agency’s Race Dates Committee Nov. 16.
With the board’s stamp of approval Thursday, Golden Gate Fields will run until June 20, followed by Pleasanton (June 21-July 11), Cal Expo (July 12-Aug. 1), Santa Rosa (Aug. 2-22), Ferndale (Aug. 23-Sept. 5, overlapped with Golden Gate), Golden Gate (Aug. 23-Sept. 19), Pleasanton (taken from Stockton, Sept. 20-Oct. 3), and Fresno (Oct. 4-17).
Because Sonoma County school districts still have not set their schedules for 2017 and the fair at Santa Rosa has no intention of running races during the school year, officials from the Sonoma County Fair have not committed to running all three weeks allotted in the approved plan. If Sonoma decides to run two weeks instead of three, Ferndale would move up to run a non-overlapped week, with its second week of racing still overlapped with Golden Gate.
Rebecca Bartling, chief executive officer of the Sonoma County Fair, made one final attempt to convince the CHRB to move Santa Rosa’s dates fully into July, to avoid clashing with the school year and to avoid the region’s racing to go without turf racing for six weeks, but her pitch was unsuccessful. She was supported at the meeting by California Thoroughbred Trainers executive director Alan Balch.
“The Sonoma County Fair has remained committed to horse racing and has exhibited this with the installation of the only fair racing turf track … By allowing Cal Expo to stay in the July position, you have six weeks without turf racing in the North,” Bartling said. “The turf course at Sonoma provides opportunity for a whole different segment of horses. … I can’t tell you how many people who come up to me and say, ‘Why isn’t Sonoma getting the July dates?’
“We’ve made the investment in the turf track and we’re the facility where the horsemen want to be. I don’t have an answer. The only answer I have is that it must be political. And do we want politics to dictate the future of horse racing in California? I don’t think that’s a good course.”
Board members did, however, indicate that just because certain dates were locked in for 2017, that didn’t necessarily mean future years would remain the same.
“I’m not particularly happy with the way this looks like it’s going to be resolved,” said CHRB commissioner Madeline Auerbach. “What I’d like to put out there is that I don’t think this should be precedent-setting. … I don’t want to see this become, ‘Well we did it this way, so let’s do it that way again.’
“I’m very concerned about the turf racing. It’s a huge percentage of our handle and when we do not afford those people who have turf runners the opportunity to run, those horses disappear from our circuit.”
Other members put the onus on the region’s stakeholders to get to work on 2018’s race dates, to avoid such a late decision next year.
“It’s now the middle of November and there are no fairs going,” said CHRB commissioner Jesse Choper. “You better start getting busy well before Thanksgiving and start thinking about this, and not make it a last-ditch proposition all the time. We’re not going to please everybody unless you can make more weeks in the summer.”
Later in the more than five-hour meeting, there were extended conversations relating to advance-deposit wagering outfits and their relationships with racetracks in California, including their contributions to the industry in the state.
A two-hour discussion regarding ADW relicensing for 2017 exposed deep rifts between those organizations, pari-mutuel employees’ unions, and other industry groups, and the CHRB decided to license the ADWs through January, and will revisit the abundant issues at a later date.