A turning point: How racing defeated decoupling in Florida

It was like a two-minute drill in the halls of the capitol complex in Tallahassee. The latest and most serious attempt to decouple slot-machine dollars from Florida horse racing looked like it would turn on a trick play the afternoon of April 15.

With Gulfstream Park owner 1/ST Racing prodding allies in the state legislature, and with about 50 racing-industry stakeholders and supporters standing by to speak against it, the Senate made an end run by calling off a committee hearing on the controversial proposal.

“We will not be hearing that bill today,” committee chairperson Jason Brodeur said without notice. “If you traveled, I am sorry, but we will not be hearing that bill.”

Flashback: Florida legislature kills decoupling.

For former Kentucky senator Damon Thayer, it was like he was trailing by four points with no time-outs left. With behind-the-scenes groundwork provided by the Florida Thoroughbred Breeders’ and Owners’ Association and the organizational heft of the newly formed Thoroughbred Racing Initiative which hired him to be its senior advisor, Thayer had a brotherly shove in his playbook ready to run from the 1-yard line.

“I remember it very well. Very clearly,” Thayer said. “It was the first sign that we really had a legitimate chance to kill the bill.”

While proponents piggybacked the decoupling plan onto a bigger gambling bill and took it to a friendlier committee down the hallway in the House, Thayer told those 50 racing supporters that they had the roadblock he was counting on in the Senate.

“Much to our delight and surprise, they announced that they weren’t going to hear it,” Thayer said. “It’s hard to tell people who don’t eat, sleep and breathe politics and government every day, but we actually had a very good day.”

That was a Tuesday in what turned out to be a very good week for the cause to maintain the current albeit struggling economic structure of horse racing in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis took aim two days later on fellow Republicans who had given decoupling some significant momentum in the House.

“You can count on me as one that is not going to look favorably on legislation that’s going to decimate any of our signature industries,” DeSantis said. He spoke from a conspicuously different bully pulpit, the auctioneer’s podium at the Ocala Breeders’ Sales spring auction.

It still would take the formality of the Senate letting the proposal die without giving it a floor vote by May 2, the last day of the legislative session. But that week in April, between the Senate committee and DeSantis, the latest threat to take slot-machine money away from Florida horse racing was as good as dead.

“We met with (DeSantis) at OBS,” said U.S. and Canada Hall of Fame trainer Mark Casse, whose roots in Florida go back to his days growing up in Ocala. “At that time I invited him to come to the Kentucky Derby. And he did come to the Derby. Mike Repole was very instrumental in that. Mike actually got him there.”

Repole did not wait to declare victory that day in Ocala. As he put it, “I feel pretty confident saying that decoupling ended today.”

The billionaire owner who calls himself the commissioner of horse racing, Repole put his money where his mouth was for this cause. According to public records filed by the Florida Freedom Fund, a conservative political-action committee created by DeSantis, Repole made a $300,000 contribution April 25 through his Orlando-based United Again corporation.

He was not alone. Three days later, a $100,000 donation from Whisper Hill Farm owner Mandy Pope, $25,000 from Lane’s End Farm’s Will Farish and another $25,000 from Farish’s wife Sarah were posted by the Florida Freedom Fund. The story of all these contributions was broken last month by Orlando-based corporate-finance reporter Jason Garcia.

While $450,000 might be looked at as buying a veto just in case it was needed from DeSantis, the money was paid only after the tide had swung in favor of Florida horsemen. That took some work.

“There were several points along the way where we turned the momentum our way,” said Thayer, who retired Jan. 1 after 22 years in the Kentucky Senate, the last 12 as the majority leader. “You have to remember. We were 50-1 to beat this. When this started out, it was on the fast track, and it was 3-5 to pass.”

The seeds of decoupling

Slot machines were legalized by Florida voters in 2004. Racetracks and jai-alai frontons were baked into the law. Activating the machines meant that a chunk of the money had to go into traditional pari-mutuels.

Decoupling had been attempted in 2012, 2016, 2018, 2021 and then again this year. The first whispers of the latest effort came last July. According to Paulick Report, that was when the Stronach Group, which operates as 1/ST Racing, served notice on local horsemen at Gulfstream Park that it wanted their cooperation to get decoupling. In exchange, track management agreed to add exercise riders to its insurance coverage for jockeys.

With the help of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association’s Tom Rooney, himself a former member of Congress from Florida, as well as the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association’s Eric Hamelback and The Jockey Club’s Jim Gagliano, the FTBOA got involved.

“During my 15 years here as CEO, the only common denominator in the decoupling battles is the FTBOA in terms of opposing it,” said Lonny Powell, a lifelong horseman and former Stronach executive who is executive director of the association. “Fortunately, it was defeated every one of those times. We’ve got a history in it.”

The latest threat percolated through the fall before coming to a boil Jan. 6. That was when 1/ST Racing issued a news release saying it had taken its decoupling request to the state legislature in Tallahassee and that it had the support of those local horsemen who made the insurance deal during the summer. In short, it was a call for the Florida government to let Gulfstream Park run its slot machines without having to run horse races, too.

“Nobody said racing is stopping,” Jeff Johnston, a lobbyist working for 1/ST, told a House committee in February. “They’re decoupling the two so they can be independent, and it gives the track flexibility to do things that they need to do at the track.”

Breeders and owners and trainers across the state were not buying it. They pointed to the potential loss of more than $6 million in annual slot-machine revenue not to mention the threat that Gulfstream Park could close within 3-7 years under the proposed legislation.

Casse took it as a call to action. He joined a group of prominent horsemen led by Ocala Stud general manager David O’Farrell to form the Thoroughbred Racing Initiative and fight decoupling. One of the group’s first calls was to Thayer.

“The guy that made the most sense to help lead us, because we didn’t have a lot of political knowledge on how things work, was Damon,” Casse said.

The bombshell news release from Stronach dropped only five days after Thayer retired from the Kentucky Senate. With a background in racing, he was the sport’s staunchest ally in Frankfort. He rounded up bipartisan support for a bill that led to the launch of sports betting while also legalizing historic horse-racing machines to stoke racing purses.

On the heels of all that success, Thayer was all set to occupy his time with horse ownership and a new bourbon brand. That lasted all of five weeks before he was recruited to the Florida cause.

“I got a call from Mark Casse on Feb. 4,” Thayer said. “I essentially started right away with Zoom calls, phone calls, emails, texts, in-person trips to Tallahassee. It was all hands on deck right away.”

As Thayer and TRI in one camp and the FTBOA in another organized the resistance, the decoupling bill moved forward in the House, where majority Republicans held committee hearings that were little more than window dressing. They would approve the proposal in short order and eventually send it to the Senate.

“We were able to piece together that if we were going to kill it, it was going to be in the Senate,” Thayer said. “People had to be prepared for likely losses in the House.”

The heavy lifting then shifted away from the House.

In the halls of the Senate

In the weeks before April 15, decoupling opponents were busy in meetings with Republicans who also control the Senate. 

“In my opinion the Senate was not a slam dunk,” Casse said. “We knew we never had a shot with the House, but it took everything we could do to even convince the Senate.”

Senate president Ben Albritton and his predecessor Wilton Simpson, now the state agriculture commissioner, met with Casse. Just back in Florida from a whirlwind weekend of racing at Oaklawn in Arkansas, Casse was in Simpson’s office April 15.

“I felt like we needed to talk to somebody one on one,” Casse said. “We went over different scenarios. And then as I was with him, I got a notice that the Senate (committee) tabled.”

Without notice, Brodeur had said the Senate appropriations committee on agriculture, environment and general government would not hear the decoupling bill that day and, as it turned out, not any day.

“It was chaotic,” Thayer said. “If it looked chaotic, it’s because it had the benefit of being true. Legislation often is chaotic, which is why we had to be well organized and able to deal with what was happening.”

Thayer rallied the 50 racing allies, many of whom rode a bus more than 180 miles from Ocala to Tallahassee. He pared the list of speakers and sent them to a House committee that afternoon. The gambling bill with decoupling tacked on was on the agenda.

Meanwhile, some of the FTBOA team stayed behind in the Senate meeting room to observe the formality of that committee approving a different version of the gambling bill that did not yet include decoupling.

The game was not necessarily over yet, since the House version of the bill still could have been fast-tracked through the Senate in the final days of the legislature’s 60-day session. As much of a long shot as that appeared to be, DeSantis had to be included in the victory formation.

Calling on the governor

DeSantis’s appearance at the OBS sales ring did not mark his first time speaking up about decoupling. Nearly two weeks earlier at a news conference in Ocala, he said, “I’m concerned with some of the things I hear about these proposals, about what that would mean for the viability of (horse racing) going forward.”

With lobbyists Rubin, Turnbull and Associates working for the TRI and SBM Partners for the FTBOA, DeSantis was asked to double down on his April 2 statement.

“We met with him early in the process in his office and made the case that this industry was too important,” Thayer said. “We worked behind the scenes and invited him to OBS. Not only were the optics important but also his statement was just spot on to the story we were telling.”

DeSantis never said April 17 that he would out and out veto the decoupling bill, but he left little room to think otherwise.

“On this issue with the horses, it seems to me that we have proposals that will have the effect of harming the industry here in Florida to basically benefit one special interest,” he said, referring to the Stronach family. “That’s not how you do good policy.”

Between the Senate hearing that was not to be and DeSantis’s statement that was, all the momentum which had been with 1/ST Racing only three months earlier had spun 180 degrees.

“For a governor to take the time to specifically focus on a particular industry and talk about it with the level of support he had, that can’t be taken for granted,” Powell said. “It’s nice to know that there are a number of people that appreciate the importance of the horse industry, the Thoroughbred industry and agriculture in general, because this is a very agricultural-driven conversation as well, especially when you get to our end of the business.”

The House still went ahead April 25 and voted 70-34 to approve the amended gambling bill. Theoretically, the Senate still could have done the same thing, and DeSantis could have vetoed it, and an override by a two-thirds vote of both chambers could have made decoupling a reality.

It was not until the legislature finished its work May 2 that the fight was over. For the time being.

The future remains uncertain

When Keith Brackpool and Stephen Screnci of 1/ST Racing met with Gulfstream Park horsemen in January, they said they could guarantee only three more years of racing if decoupling were to be approved. Without it, they said they could not guarantee a thing.

“If we don’t get decoupled, we can’t give assurances that we can continue to race,” said Screnci, 1/ST’s president of racing and business development. “That wasn’t a threat. That was a statement.”

Regardless, racing continues at Gulfstream Park. If recent form holds, dates for the 2025-26 championship meet will be announced next month. But what about 2026-27 and beyond?

“Two things are going on,” Screnci told Horse Racing Nation in January. “Number one, you have what’s going on in the industry with all the headwinds. ... Number two, the value of the property in an urban area, 245 acres, is substantial. At what point do you continue in a business that’s not making money and hold the real estate?”

Screnci said that was not “foreshadowing” any intentions by the Stronach family, but the drumbeat is foreboding.

Thayer is experiencing that as he branches out in his role as an advisor to the Thoroughbred industry. This month he was in Iowa to meet regulators and horsemen there to strategize raising the profile of that state’s breeding and racing.

“I’m sort of half joking, half serious,” he said. “My new job is to save horse racing one state at a time.”

Thayer knows the work in Florida was not finished with that turn of events April 15. So do the rank-and-file racing professionals from Powell to stable workers across the state.

“We won the first round,” Casse said. “The problem is I think there’s about 10 rounds.”