Despite reports to the contrary, NYRA said it has no plans to close Aqueduct Race Track any time soon. File Photo
The Aqueduct Race Track in South Ozone Park is in no immediate danger of closing, the New York Racing Association said following reports that members of the financially-strapped racing organization last week floated the idea of shuttering Queens’ venue.
The Albany Times Union reported last Thursday that at an Albany meeting of the NYRA reorganization board, trustees addressed the group’s financial woes – including recording a $10.3 million operating loss in the first six months – and said they were looking at a variety of ways to give the group a financial boost, including ending Aqueduct’s reign as one of three thoroughbred horse-racing tracks in New York state.
“There are no plans to close Aqueduct,” NYRA spokesman Eric Wing said this week. “There was a lot of preliminary, informal discussion about a host of possibilities regarding everything from monies to legislation that hasn’t been passed yet, and in the course of that discussion Aqueduct came up.”
Wing said that while trustees did discuss Aqueduct’s tenure, the idea of closing the track was in no way meant to be taken as a concrete proposal.
“Everything is being evaluated at this point by our reorganization board, but there are no plans to close Aqueduct,” Wing stressed.
NYRA is facing significant financial difficulties, and its operating loss for the first six months of this year is twice as much as the loss that occurred during the same period in 2012. The numbers improve when incorporating the revenue from the VLTs run by Resorts World Casino New York City – a racino located next to the track, and NYRA reported a net income of $8.1 million when including funds from the terminals.
“‘VLT money is not a source of revenue we have control over,’” the Times Union reported NYRA Chairman David Skorton said at the organization’s first public meeting in its 150-year history. “‘We have to get to zero at our bottom line.’”
Once a private organization, NYRA has effectively become a state agency after Gov. Cuomo took control of it last year. In order for the racing organization to, once again, become private, the Times Union reported that trustee Robert Megna, the state’s budget director, said Aqueduct must be able to operate without the influx of monies from the racino.
“‘It will be incredibly important to improve the racing side,’” the Times Union reported Megna said.
NYRA wasn’t the only one saying Aqueduct wouldn’t close, and a former state official who worked on racing issues panned the notion that Queens’ track would become a thing of the past.
“The idea they would shut down a race track that’s connected to the largest taxpayer in the state – Resorts World – is highly unlikely,” the individual said.
Additionally, the thoroughbred horse breeding industry has “exploded” after the Resorts World casino opened – which makes it increasingly unlikely that the state would close Aqueduct, the former official said.
“We’re taking business away from Kentucky,” he said. “…You’re not going to mess with the breeding industry because you’d have people up in arms upstate.”
And, while Aqueduct is performing the worst out of the three thoroughbred tracks in the state – Saratoga and Belmont being the other two – the former state official said the venue is faring far better than it once was.
“For years, Aqueduct was falling to pieces – there was literally pounds of pigeon sh*t underneath the stands,” he said. “But now, Resorts World is making it into a destination spot. It’s a destination spot more than Aqueduct has been in decades – if it ever was.”
By Anna Gustafson
