Relocating horse racetracks to bring millions for Ohio

Associated Press

TOLEDO

Ohio stands to pocket nearly $150 million from a gambling company building two casinos so that it can move its two horse-racing tracks to other areas within the state and reduce the competition for drawing gamblers to its casinos.

It’s a deal where everybody wins, perhaps.

The two neighborhoods that will be left with an abandoned horse track and acres of empty land face an uncertain future. Ohio has pledged to chip in up to $3 million so that the two cities losing the horse tracks, Toledo and the Columbus suburb of Grove City, can find a new use for the locations.

City leaders and elected officials in both towns would like a bigger share of the pot that the state will collect because they’re losing existing revenue from the tracks and the costs of redeveloping the sites.

“We’d all like more. Comparing it with what the state is receiving, it’s a small portion,” said Charles Bosa Jr., city administrator in Grove City, which is home to the state’s first thoroughbred track, Beulah Park.

Penn National Gaming Inc. plans to move Beulah Park’s thoroughbred racing from suburban Columbus to Austintown, where it will build a new track near the Ohio Turnpike. It also wants to close Raceway Park in Toledo and relocate to a new track in Dayton on the site of a shuttered auto plant.

It plans to spend at least $300 million on the two new tracks, which it says would create thousands of temporary construction jobs along with permanent jobs at the two sites.

Penn National, based in Wyomissing, Pa., also is building casinos in Columbus and Toledo that will open within the next year and that’s why it wants to relocate the tracks.

Penn National, which owns and operates 19 casinos in the United States and Canada, has pledged to give state about one-third of the profits from video slot machines that it wants to put in the new horse tracks along with a $50 million license fee for the video gambling machines at each track. That’s on top of a $150 million relocation fee that will go to the state’s general fund.

The agreement hinges on whether state lawmakers will give their approval to allowing video lottery machines at all the state’s horse tracks and if the state wins a lawsuit filed by gambling opponents who are challenging whether the state can allow video slots at the horse tracks without going before the voters.

Elected officials in Toledo are grumbling that the state will make a bundle off the deal and should share some of it.

State Rep. Matt Szollosi, a Democrat from suburban Toledo, said it was a matter of fairness. “At this point we need to make the best of a bad situation,” he said.

If the site sits empty, it will hurt not only the neighborhood but also restaurants, bars and other businesses that benefited from having the track nearby, Szollosi said.

The governor’s office thinks that $3 million for each site is sufficient, said Rob Nichols, a spokesman for Gov. John Kasich. But it will be up to the Legislature to make the final call as it’s now finalizing a sweeping bill on new casino regulations, he said.