Flatter: The future of Maryland racing goes beyond the sport

Please forgive my 17 years of experience and nearly 65 years of gristle that color this attempt at a long view of Maryland horse racing. Of the Preakness. Of Pimlico.

There is much more at stake with the latest, we-really-mean-it, this-time-for-sure, now-or-never proposal to repair the sport in a colony where it got started 279 years ago. And no, that is not coincidentally the age of the current Pimlico grandstands.

The plan unveiled last Friday by governor Wes Moore is for the Stronach Group to get out of the business of racing in Maryland but keeping financial dibs on the Preakness brand. Pimlico, which has not had a significant facelift since the old clubhouse burned down in 1966, would be refurbished with a new training center built nearby. The Preakness would be run for at least two years at Laurel Park, which then would be closed and presumably put up for sale by Stronach.

This is not just about what the racing industry thinks of the plan. The sport long ago lost its chance to figure this out on its own. This is about whether the state legislature endorses the $375 million rewrite of a proposal that was signed into law nearly four years ago, just as we were starting to tread the COVID waters. Without General Assembly approval, the story ends here.

This is also about a Baltimore neighborhood that faces the potentially life-changing impact of a shiny, new Pimlico, with its promise of new racecourses, new barns, a new but much smaller grandstand, maybe even backstretch housing and, get this, a trackside hotel with plenty of underground parking.

Did I hear the word gentrification? It came and went so fast in such a high-pitched tone that I think it was heard only by spaniels and terriers.

Like I said, experience and gristle.

My first visit to the Preakness was nearly 17 years ago. I just had returned to the U.S. after living three years in Australia, where I worked for a radio station owned by the racing industry in the state of Victoria. Back in America, I continued to file reports for RSN927 for another 12 years.

Every May, when the Preakness came up with my colleagues in Melbourne, so, too, did questions about the future of the race. I dutifully reported in 2007 that the gossip centered on whether Frank Stronach’s Magna Entertainment, which took control of Pimlico for $117 million just five years before, would move the second jewel of the Triple Crown to its newly rebuilt facility at Gulfstream Park. That proved to be a canard, but at the time we did not know that for sure.

Then came the Magna bankruptcy, a restructuring into what gradually has become 1/ST Racing, the threat to move the Preakness and all of Maryland racing to a Laurel Park that would be spiffed up for a pipe dream of a Breeders’ Cup, the tens of millions of dollars Stronach spent on Laurel, the Maryland Jockey Club’s condemning of part of the grandstands at Pimlico, a lawsuit by the city of Baltimore, a settlement that led to the state’s plan to rebuild Pimlico and Laurel, the cost overruns that coincided with COVID, the 180 done by new Stronach management to mothball Laurel and focus on a rebuilt Pimlico and, last Friday, the much-ballyhooed, new proposal to have a non-profit, state agency run racing and spend that $375 million in bond money to rebuild one racetrack and not two.

To paraphrase a game show from the 1980s, it’s more than Pimlico. It’s Pimlico Plus. This can be followed only by Super Pimlico, starring the late Bert Convy.

The process is pretty much the same. Only the number of pages seems to change. In this case, 16 of them in a white paper and 81 more in a digital brochure, in full color, mind you, from the same company that built you Oriole Park at Camden Yards and the Ravens’ M&T Bank Stadium.

As in the past, it did not take long for skeptics to find fault with the initial spin from the governor and the freshly scrubbed bureaucrats from what has been dubbed the Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority, the state’s attempt to mirror the New York Racing Association.

“Some of the critics have already come out very quickly without letting us continue to do our work,” said Alan Foreman, who wears a lot of hats in the racing industry. In a Thursday Zoom call with the state’s racing constituents, he was acting in his role as the top lawyer for the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association.

“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here,” he said, paraphrasing a line that has been uttered lot in the last 17 years.

Unwanted obstacles or not, the various factions of racing have every right to be heard on this, especially since the MTROA had its first public meeting only five months ago.

Take the hundreds of backstretch workers who toil with upwards of 1,400 horses. They will be displaced maybe twice. Once to move to Laurel for a couple years and then again to move back to both Pimlico and the yet-to-be-determined site of the new training track.

“Obviously it will put some stress on those people,” said Tom Kelso, the former head of the Maryland Stadium Authority, which had its hands deep in the writing of the original $375 million rebuilding plan. In an interview last Friday on WBAL radio, he said, “These are lower-wage jobs that people don’t have the ability to just uproot themselves and move someplace else.”

Couple that with residents in Park Heights, where Pimlico has stood for more than 153 years. It is a low-income, largely Black neighborhood of about 30,000 people. The impact of Pimlico Plus, plus whatever ritzy additions come with it, present concerns that even a unified racing industry cannot and should not ignore.

Perhaps most important in all this is the current state of the economy in the state of Maryland. When the $375 million bond issue was passed nearly four years ago, it might have looked like a bargain to maintain Maryland racing and all the jobs built into it.

Support was not unanimous. In a September editorial, the Maryland business and legal publication The Daily Record raised concerns about the “cost to taxpayers, declining support among the public and the questionable future of horse racing in Maryland.”

Outside the Thoroughbred industry, those voices have gotten louder, especially since money is tight in Maryland.

Just two days before the Pimlico Plus plan was unveiled, the economists and bean counters in the office of Maryland comptroller Brooke Lierman put out their own glitzy, 116-page document on the state of the economy during the past year.

In an otherwise upbeat preface, Lierman wrote, “Recent fluctuations in Maryland’s economic environment serve as flashing yellow lights for the state’s fiscal health.” She pointed out that the labor force is still smaller than it was before COVID, job growth has flattened, and more residents are taking refuge in states where it is cheaper to live.

The lack of affordable housing and child care also were mentioned. These are real-life, hot-button topics that go in one ear and out the other within the vacuum of the racing industry, no matter how much it quixotically might land on the same proverbial page.

In the end, the future of Maryland racing as outlined last Friday falls to a state legislature already wrestling with what the state Board of Revenue said would be a $761 million budget deficit in 2024-25 with all signs pointing to $2.7 billion of red ink in five years.

When the $375 million plan to rebuild Pimlico and Laurel was signed into law in 2020, Maryland was coming out of a fiscal year when it had a surplus. It was small, and COVID devoured it, but the state was not yet mired in the red. Times have changed quickly.

Even though it was a Republican governor back then and a Democrat now, and even though Democrats run the legislature, the morning line says here that it will not be a minus pool in betting on the passage of Pimlico Plus.

The state budget is due April 1. For anyone gambling on the future of Maryland racing, that might be when the windows close.

At least until the next time.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, and they may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.