While the State of Florida grapples with a $2 billion budget deficit, one of its top regulatory agencies is simultaneously expending untold taxpayer funds to escalate and exacerbate a costly legal battle to defend the expansion of gambling, to which Florida’s top-ranking state legislators have repeatedly voiced their increasing opposition during the past several weeks.

During early December 2011, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation released dozens of pages of publicly-funded litigation designed to defend the very situation that the Florida Legislature is now vigorously debating how to curtail.

With the Cabinet members now having publicly declared their opposition to the expansion of gambling through destination resorts, the State of Florida’s attitude toward the unfettered proliferation of gambling has been greatly clarified.

But, to the chagrin of its sponsors, the intent of the would-be destination resort legislation’s proposed gaming commission had already been unexpectedly usurped by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s (DPPR’s) highly questionable and unilateral award of a racing license to Gretna Racing LLC. As expected, the dubious license was ultimately used for purpose of introducing “pari-mutuel barrel racing.” Constituting a brand new gambling product, the license was awarded without enabling legislation, proper regulatory hearings or public input. As expected, Gretna Racing officials immediately used their new license to secure a slot machine referendum in Gadsden County—a loophole-laden legal maneuver that quickly brought copycat requests from other small pari-mutuel permitholders.

So outraged were top legislative leaders at Gretna Racing’s actions that, in a Senate Committee on Regulated Industries workshop last week, some called for the need to solve the Gretna Racing problem before taking up the destination resort bills.

“As the people’s regulator, it is unconscionable that the DBPR is using the public dime to finance protracted litigation to protect its unilateral expansion of gambling, when the Legislature is making it quite clear that this is not the direction it wants for the State of Florida,” remarked Florida Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association (FHBPA) Executive Director Kent Stirling.

“What amazes me is that the State of Florida is actually finance failure by strangling off what could be thousands of jobs and exponentially greater wagering if Gretna Racing were to simply have adhered to legitimate Quarter Horse racing,” added FHBPA President Phil Combest, who also noted the startling disparity in opening day handle between Gretna Racing ($2,581) and Gulfstream Park ($4,837,605—constitutes a 22% increase for Gulfstream over the comparable day last season). These numbers were generated literally within two days of one another. The comparison that the Gulfstream Park and Gretna Racing facilities were the same as one another was made on December 2 by former Gulfstream Park attorney-turned-Gretna Racing Developer David Romanik in an interview with internationally known horse racing writer Ray Paulick.

Combest reminded that Florida regulations stipulate that pari-mutuel permitholders must demonstrate that they can protect the flow of revenue to the State. “So we’re killing the revenue we could have had with legitimate racing, killing jobs in the horse racing industry, hammering the gravestones with taxpayer-funded litigation and paying Florida legislators to contemplate the whole thing,” he said. “To me, that’s the real government waste.”

Attention All FHBPA MEMBERS

The FHBPA is having their annual Membership and Nominating Dinner, Thursday, December 15, 2011, after the last race at Gulfstream Park in the "Ten Palms".

All members are urged to attend.

Bill Kaplan kept Calder’s winning streak alive in Breeder’s Cup races with the impressive performance turned in by Musical Romance in the Filly and Mare Sprint. Last year trainers Stan Gold and David Fawkes each won Breeders’ Cup races with Awesome Feather and Big Drama respectively. This year neither trainer fared as well, but trainer/owner Bill Kaplan did as he saddled 20-1 shot Musical Romance to a gutty victory for his ownership partner, Pinnacle Racing Stable.

Musical Romance broke sharply and laid second on the rail early before dropping back to fifth leaving the turn where she then came again, seemingly willing herself through a hole that didn’t seem to exist. Once through the tight hole, she battled for the lead until she proved strongest and began to draw off in deep stretch.

The victory was her ninth and sixth added-money event as she again made a runner-up out of last year’s Filly and Mare runner up, Switch. Musical Romance was purchased by Kaplan for $22,000 from the 2009 OBS Spring Sale.

We are hopeful that she will win the Eclipse Award in the female sprint category for the FHBPA’s Secretary, Bill Kaplan. Why not, she deserves it and both of our Calder Breeders’ Cup winners last year won an Eclipse Award?

Only Florida could permit something like this to legally take place. But I live in Florida and we are on the verge of having our first pari-mutuel barrel racing facility in the town of Gretna in northern Florida, and so far it is completely legal according to the Florida Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering (DPMW).

You might ask yourself, “Boy ,some people in Florida must really love watching girls barrel race.” Or possibly you might ask, “What in the heck is barrel racing, and how do I wager on it?” I will let you read this article and you can determine for yourself if you think barrel racing came to Florida because those responsible for it are of an altruistic nature and love the idea of giving more opportunities for young women to barrel race, or is this just nothing more than a get-rich-quick scheme to immediately get slots and a card room?

But just what is barrel racing? It is a timed event where the participants, usually young women, race their horses around 3 barrels in a clover leaf pattern as fast as they can. It usually takes place at Western Horse Shows or at actual rodeos. Barrel racers usually race for prizes, and never are we aware of the public legally wagering on the outcome of these barrel races. In fact, the National Barrel Horse Association, the world’s largest with over 24,000 members, has condemned this exploitation of young girls as objects to be wagered upon. So how did this travesty begin? Well, it all began with a number of quarter horse permits being issued in Florida three or four years ago. Most of them were handled by Gulfstream Park lobbyist/lawyer, Marc Dunbar. Dunbar then teamed up with Paul Micucci and David Romanik who had both been former Presidents at Gulfstream Park, each for a very short period of time, before being fired.

In 2008, the trio acquired some property in Jefferson County -a North Florida county that had already approved pari-mutuel wagering long ago for the creation of the Jefferson County Kennel Club. Our boys then tried to have the Jefferson County Commissioners permit them to have a Quarter Horse race track with a lounge, restaurant, bowling alley and, of course, a card room. Oh, and they only wanted to run six days of Quarter Horse racing per year, something that a lot of folks at the time thought was strange, since their dog track ran over 200 days of racing a year to operate a profitable card room. In Florida, once you begin operating your pari-mutuel race meet, you are immediately permitted a card room. According to an article on the Florida Baptist Witness web site about this 2008 commission hearing, Dunbar introduced Romanik as the “horsemen” that came up with the idea for the then-proposed Jefferson Downs Quarter Horse Track. Romanik then stated that he was “just interested in the horse part of this business.” Apparently, all six days of it. One of the speakers at that meeting, David Hall, asked, “Are they just building a horse track as they are saying, or is there more behind it?” The next citizen to speak, a pastor named, John Wesley, spoke about the promised jobs this track would bring and facetiously stated, “I guess we need the School Board to put into our curriculum bartending and card dealing so our kids will have a future in our county.”

Others mentioned in the article spoke to the “fast tracking” of this application, and to the rumored threat of a lawsuit by the “powerful attorney” Dunbar if the Commission didn’t move forward their application.

It was all downhill for our Gulfstream boys after that, and the commission voted 4-1 to deny the permit. A picture accompanying the article was priceless as it showed a stunned and dejected Dunbar and Romanik after the negative vote. As to appealing the outcome of the vote, Romanik told the Tallahassee Democrat, “I really have to think about it and assess what happened.”

Our “doctors,” “MD” and “DR,” then soon began operating in another nearby county in North Florida, Gadsden County. This time they rolled out the same old promises to the people of Gretna but did so apparently without Micucci. Their financial backing came from the Poarch Band of the Creek Indians from Alabama. These Indians already owned the Pensacola Greyhound Track in the Panhandle, and had spent a million dollars to buy some land in the town of Gretna, as Equestrian Land Holdings, LLC. Our heroes now added another lobbyist, Gene McGee, and the three of them each held 10% of their new venture called “Gretna Racing LLC” while the Poarch Indians retained the other 70%. Again they promised the people of Gretna pretty much the same thing as they had in Jefferson County, but without the bowling alley. For several years now, they have promised the people of Gretna a Quarter Horse track without ever constructing it. In September of this year, they applied to the Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering (DPMW) for their consent to conduct, not six days, but instead just two days of Quarter Horse racing, one to be held on December 17th and one in June. This application was kicked back to them by the DPMW for deficiencies, but Dunbar made it known that there would be no stopping his group. Since there seems to be nothing in Florida Statutes that would limit a quarter horse permit holder to actually running legitimate Quarter Horse races, he might have been right.

One of Gretna’s glaring application deficiencies was that it had no signed contract with the majority horsemen’s group expected to be racing (?) at its facility as mandated by the Interstate Horseracing Act of 1978. Romanik solved this little problem by simply forming his own horsemen’s organization, The “North Florida Horsemen’s Association,” whose membership and Board of Directors would be interesting to know. With the Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering Director now having been fired during this time, many letters from individuals and horsemen’s groups were sent to Ken Lawson the Secretary of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) asking him not to permit barrel racing in Florida under a Quarter Horse license. Why horsemen were told to send our letters to the DBPR and not the DPMW, I do not know. In any event, both the Florida and Tampa Bay Downs HBPAs sent letters along with the Florida Thoroughbred Breeders, the Florida Standardbred Breeders, the Florida Quarter Horse Association and the American Quarter Horse Association, and even the aforementioned National Barrel Horse Association (NBHA) among others.

As I pointed out in the FHBPA letter to Secretary Lawson, every track in Florida, except for Calder, owns a quarter horse permit. I further stated, “The loss of jobs to the State of Florida could be monumental if this application is approved and other tracks rush through the now open door with their barrel racing applications.” In other words, this could be the end of horse racing as we know it in Florida, inasmuch as all tracks are funded by card rooms and most also by slot revenue. I know it’s amazing, but I am unaware of any race track in Florida that opposed the DBPR’s approval of this application for barrel racing. As previously mentioned the National Barrel Horse Association (NBHA) then officially came out in opposition to the Gretna facility being permitted to conduct pari-mutuel barrel racing on young females. The NBHA Southeastern Director, Paul Stanley strongly stated, “There is no place for betting where there are children competing.”

According to the letter the DBPR sent me in response to my letter on behalf of the FHBPA, the DPMW had “90 days to approve or deny the application.” That would mean the Division had until at least the end of December to act on this application. This could be a problem, because our boys had announced that their first day of barrel racing would be December 1st. They and their Indian partners actually had printed ads with a picture of a young female barrel racer and information from their “North Florida Horsemen Association” explaining they were having barrel racing for total prize money of “$38,000 NFHA Barrel Race Competition 10 days 19 Performing 8 horses per performance” Those are their actual words and lack of punctuation from the poorly written ad. By mid-October the DPMW signed off on the Gretna application for barrel racing. This would then automatically allow Gretna to open their card room after they began pari-mutuel barrel racing on December 1, 2012. But Dunbar and Romanik were not done yet. They then immediately asked the Gadsden County Commissioners to approve slot machines at their facility. Florida has statutes that mandate that horse purses and monies for breeders’ awards be funded from alternative gaming such as card rooms and slots. But, alas, for barrel racing there are no mandatory requirements for any such funding. I doubt this came as a surprise to Romanik and Dunbar.

On November 1st, the Gadsden County Commission voted unanimously to approve “a January vote to allow slot machines in the impoverished county” reported the Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau. The referendum will appear on the January 31, 2012 Republican Presidential Preference Ballot. The issue of whether this election will even be legal has recently come to light, given the drastic changes effected to Florida’s voting laws this year.

The days that immediately followed Gadsden’s misguided vote are reminiscent of “Whack-A-Mole,” the child’s game that features a series of holes through which moles pop their heads out. When you hit the mole on the head with a hammer, another mole invariably pops out of another hole and then you hit that one, and on and on. The reality is that, with the Gadsden vote, our heroes have made Florida one big game of Whack-A-Mole for horsemen, because now other obscure pari-mutuels are popping up all over the state and asking for barrel racing permits at their own facilities.

Apparently, our “doctors” have determined that horsemen are purse-gobbling “parasites on the industry” that need to be removed from their altruistic tracks altogether, and they are now performing the operation for free (?).

“The Quarter Horse crowd claims that lowly barrel racing is just a cheaper vehicle for Gretna Racing to qualify for poker rooms and slot machines. Of course, the Thoroughbred folks said the same thing about Quarter Horse tracks. They’re both right. Gambling conglomerates, if they could get slots and card rooms and table games, would happily reduce their parimutuels to hermit crab races.” – columnist Fred Grimm, Miami Herald

The technicality of establishing some sort of parimutuel endeavor in order to legally justify the presence of casino gaming reached a new bend in the road recently when a north Florida county was granted a permit to offer wagering on barrel racing, which would set the stage for an accompanying casino, if approved by referendum next January.

There has been the predictable screeching from other horse interests accusing a certain barrel racing group of allowing themselves to be used by a casino company as a quick and dirty way to get a foot in the door. This would differ, of course, from the slow, stately march toward respectable casinos in places like New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, and Louisiana, where slot machines now drive the engines for all manner of racing breeds. But why not barrels, too? In the modern climate of slots first, questions later, how can anyone find anything inherently wrong with barrel racing as a betting proposition? They go ’round and ’round real fast and it’s over in a hurry. Sometimes a horse falls down, and sometimes a rider falls off. Sound familiar Thoroughbred fans? The riders even wear bright shirts and big buckles, and they are not as a rule encumbered by such nanny-state niceties as helmets and protective vests.

For the most part, every round of barrel racing is a variation on a very narrow theme – just as six-furlong races at Charles Town in November can start to look a lot alike – but the sport is intimate, and there’s always a chance one of the horses will go to buckjumping or sunfishing, then tear off for the barn while shedding his rider against the railing of a pipe-pen chute. Who wouldn’t want to bet on that?

It is perfectly understandable that representatives of the Florida Quarter Horse and Thoroughbred industries would be vocally opposed to the broadening parimutuel racing to a discipline more closely associated with the rodeo, just to secure a casino. What next – polo?

In case anyone has failed to notice, however, there persists a nagging but direct relationship between what is sown and what is reaped. Since the “slots as savior” ethic has become pervasive, no one should ever be shocked at what flows from the well. In granting parimutuel licenses to barrel racing groups, the Florida State Racing and Wagering Board contends it is acting in accordance with legislation that limits the expansion of casinostyle gambling to sites that host some kind of horse racing. But as columnist Fred Grimm suggests, the goalposts are portable. If all it takes is a few bucks chucked into a legislator’s campaign fund to push through a bill – think of the jobs, the children, the troops! – the imagination reels at the possibilities for variations on casino enabling parimutuel competition. Could one of these news bulletins be far down the line?

ALBANY, N.Y. – The momentum of the casino-fueled New York Thoroughbred industry has been placed in jeopardy by the looming prospect of legalized betting on pigeon racing. Pushed by the entrepreneurial avian group Wingnuts, a bill to broadly expand eligibility for a casino gambling license has been adopted by the New York Assembly on a vote of 140-4 (one abstention, three muggings), with the lone restriction that a casino site may not offer any sort of inter-species competition.

“We’re good with that,” said Terry Boyd Malloy, Wingnuts executive director and owner of Coops R Us supplies. “All we want is a chance to go big time with the birds.”

It is estimated that pigeon racing, a time-honored New York pastime, could generate as much as $750 million a year in mutuel handle, according to government estimates, and untold billions from anticipated pigeon-casino-related revenue. “This will cut the you-know-whats off any gains horse racing has made,” said Tony Mandible, a gaming industry analyst. “Which would you rather clean up after?”

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The Florida Department of Rampant Development has green-lighted plans for the $385 million Vache de la Mer Gaming project to accommodate the proposed combination slots complex and adjacent parimutuel betting venue in the coastal community of Cape Dismal.

In addition to the 5,000 slot machines earmarked for the project – which pencils out at a rate of 13 machines for every adult Cape Dismal resident – Vache de la Mer also will feature a million gallon “Aquarena” to present what is undoubtedly the nation’s first officially sanctioned program of parimutuel manatee racing.

“It’s more like manatee drifting,” said Baxter Flange, president of the Florida Sea Cowboys Association. “Don’t be looking for nothing like the razzle-dazzle of barrel racing, or bat burning. You can put down a bet on your favorite cow, go out for barbecue, spend an hour at the slots, then come on back and the race is just getting interesting. Anyways, it’s got a place in the local culture. And except for the smell, it’s good family fun.”

Local environmentalist Darcy Pescada led the unsuccessful opposition to the Vache de la Mer permitting process, citing concerns that the racing manatees would not be subject to the same rigorous drug testing programs in place to monitor Florida’s other parimutuel endeavors.

“They’re testing barrel racers, Thoroughbreds, Quarter Horses, greyhounds, flamingos, and alligators,” Pescada complained. “You’re telling me someone wouldn’t try to hop a manatee if they could impact the outcome of a betting race? We’re talking about human nature here.”