Committee hears calls for Lincoln equine complex, updated gambling rules

 12 comment(s)  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star

OMAHA — Lincoln offered 37 days of live horse racing in 2008, Grand Island 35 and Columbus 24. Omaha’s 10-year-old Horsemen’s Park featured four days.

But all the betters with their eyes glued to 600 television screens Thursday show how strongly live simulcasting of races in other states figures into the Omaha formula responsible for 51 percent of all the horse wagering in the state last year.

A legislative panel and Nebraska’s horse-racing enthusiasts are looking for more of those sorts of antidotes to the loss of the nationally renowned Ak-Sar-Ben and its milelong track in Omaha in 1995 as they confront the scheduled demise of racing at Lincoln’s State Fair Park after 2012.

[+]Enlarge

Fans cheer during a race at State Fair Park in July. (LJS file)

Fans cheer during a race at State Fair Park in July. (LJS file)

Veteran jockey Perry Compton didn’t mince his words Thursday. “We need something and we need it quick,” he said.

He called it “an awkward time” for those trying to defuse the threat to horse racing, “but one of the things that can come out of hardship is creativity.”

Lynne Schuller, executive director of the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, warned that “without those 37 live days (in Lincoln), the circuit collapses.”

As the General Affairs Committee held its third and final interim hearing on the future of the state’s horse-racing industry at Horsemen’s Park, there were more calls for proceeding with the recently announced plans for a $50-million equine complex and its milelong track on Lincoln’s eastern outskirts.

And Greg Hosch, general manager at the Omaha track, was also among those advocating for more modern, more flexible and more creative gambling rules as a way of boosting purses and saving his favorite sport.

“We’re in the 21st century,” Hosch said during his testimony Thursday. “We cannot continue to operate with laws from the 1930s.”

An example of an antiquated approach in the age of the Internet, Hosch said, is the requirement that all Nebraska bets on horse races be placed at one of the state’s five horse-racing tracks.

Omaha attorney Mike Kratville also told the four state senators on hand in Omaha that online betting should be allowed. “We just need to change state law,” Kratville said, “and then everyone can benefit.”

Adding to the sense of urgency in Omaha is the flourishing environment at Prairie Meadows near Des Moines, Iowa,, where money from casino-style gambling is funneled into the winnings in live races for Iowa-born horses.

That, said Ashland horse owner and trainer Dave Anderson, is causing Nebraskans to move their horse farms across the border and to breed, foal and raise their animals there.

A “maiden” horse that has never won a race in Nebraska would have a shot at $6,500 at Fonner Park in Grand Island, Anderson said. Because of the potent revenue mix at Prairie Meadows, the comparable prize would be $30,000.

“It’s not only resurrected it,” Anderson said of the effect of expanded gambling on horse racing at Prairie Meadows. “It’s booming over there now.”

Any attempt by the Legislature to stage a gambling counterattack in Nebraska could easily run afoul of voters, who have repeatedly rejected the expanded gambling opportunities put in place in Iowa, Minnesota and elsewhere.

Tressa O’Neill, involved in a thoroughbred stable venture at Grand Island, stepped forward Thursday to oppose the idea of putting casinos and slot machines at Nebraska tracks. “To put it in the vernacular of my generation, ‘racinos’ stink,” O’Neill said.

She feels better about basing what she described as carefully segregated “card clubs” at race tracks, permitting poker and other card games where bets could be placed, and routing some of that money into horse-racing coffers.

As opposed to pulling slot-machine levers, she called that “a very social atmosphere.”

Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or at ahovey@journalstar.com.