Oregon Racetrack Faces Axing of 226 Workers Without Gaming Machines

An Beaver State racetrack owned past Dutch people Bros coffee billionaire Travis Boersma testament repose turned 226 workers next month. That’s unless the tell racing charge greenlights its practical application for 225 historical horse-racing machines.

The ultimatum, first of all reported by Willamette Week, comes as an confederation of 9 Oregon tribal operators continues to pressurise the legislative assembly to place gambling elaboration on hold. These include the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, which operates the Seven Feathers Casino Resort, 40 miles northward of Grants Pass.

The tribes are calling for a comprehensive brush up of the state’s play landscape, noting it has been a quarter-century since the lowest one.

They throw exclusivity on slots and gambling casino gaming below the terms of their compacts with the state. But they experience this rightfulness is beingness threatened by the growing of historical horse-racing machines, as considerably as mobile betting, which has been uncommitted via the OR Lottery since 2019.

A greenback that would experience constituted a task drive to examine the future of play in the nation stalled in the law-makers last year.

Flying Lark on Hold

Following the demise of Portland Meadows inwards 2019, Grants Pass is now the only commercial track left wing inwards Oregon.

Boersma is itching to open up the Flying Lark, a dining, drinking, and play ecesis adjacent to the cart track that he claims will transubstantiate Grants Pass into an “epicenter of worldwide racing.”

But first, he needs those play machines.

In a notice to res publica authorities seen past Willamette Week, the data track said it had expected a determination endure month from the racing commission. But it latterly learned it first needs sign-off from the Oregon Department of Justice, which is holding upward the process.

We’ve speckled every ‘i,’ we’ve crossed every ‘t’ — we’ve had legion(p) conversations with tribe, with state and political figures, soup-to-nuts, top-to-bottom o'er the course of instruction of the utmost leash years and in that respect has non once been the mention, the thought that we would non follow able to open up our doors,” Boersma told local ABC affiliate KDRV.

“I had a conversation with [employees] lowest hebdomad and i had to permit them cognise what do and effect are here, and it’s catastrophic for people and their lives,” he added.

Tech Outpacing Regulation

Historical horse racing machines earmark players to bet on replays of past races with the identities of the races obscured. They have got been effectual in Oregon since 2012, but only at racetracks. That’s because they generally utilisation the pari-mutuel betting scheme permitted at racetracks.

The tribes difference of opinion this. In a missive in conclusion Oct to the state’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, they complained the newest multiplication of machines had “evolved beyond the pari-mutuel system of rules to the peak where they are “nothing other than expansion slot machines, from a player perspective.”

“The state’s regulatory framework has non evolved to shine unexampled technology or its impacts on the public,” the tribes wrote. “We are at a vital instant where the commonwealth is about to approve the largest elaboration of state-regulated gaming inward decades without public or legislative input.”