Horse Races At Chicago’s Bankrupt Maywood Park Face Cancellation

An advocacy group within Illinois’s horse-racing industry is fighting to save live racing at the financially struggling Maywood Park track for the rest of the year.

The Illinois Harness Horseman’s Association is fighting a court battle against racetrack officials, who are proposing to cancel harness horse races after Oct. 3, arguing that the closure would unfairly force “an immediate eviction” on more than 100 horses and about 50 people who live in dorms at the track in Chicago’s Melrose Park suburb.

In court papers, Maywood Park officials told a bankruptcy judge that closing early would save $165,000 in track maintenance costs, manure removal, security and other operating costs. Displaced horsemen and their families, they added, could move to a nearby sister race track, Balmoral Racing Club, which has stables for more than 1,000 horses.

Balmoral Racing’s one-mile track is more profitable and allows more horses to compete in a race, yet both tracks cost about the same amount of money to maintain, officials said in documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago.

Maywood’s half-mile track has hosted harness races for 68 seasons in a row, which is the longest streak in state history, according to court papers. Together, the racetracks employ about 240 people.

Judge Donald R. Cassling, who has been asked to approve the early closure, has yet to rule on the matter.

Racetrack officials said they are trying to get Maywood Park and Balmoral Park, which are in bankruptcy, in better financial shape to win 2016 race dates from the state’s racing board, whose members consider whether a racetrack has the financial power to stay in business throughout the year. Both tracks are also up for sale.

The racetracks have gradually slimmed down their racing schedule as competition for gambling dollars grows from riverboat casinos, video lottery terminals and combined racing-casino facilities. These days, Maywood Park and Balmoral Park take in roughly 85% of their profits during Friday and Saturday racing, according to court papers.

“The [horseman’s association] has been keenly aware of the inevitability of reduced race dates at Maywood for years,” the racetracks’ lawyers said in court papers.

On top of growing competition, the racetracks lost an $82 million battle with riverboat casino operators over an alleged bribery scheme involving disgraced ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The tracks filed for bankruptcy in December to prevent the casinos from trying to collect that money.

The riverboat casinos had filed a lawsuit that accused the racetracks’ owners of illegally promising to contribute money to Mr. Blagojevich’s campaign if he renewed a 3% tax on the riverboat casinos. That deal was captured on wiretaps during the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s five-year investigation into public corruption in Illinois, according to the federal lawsuit that the riverboat casinos filed in 2009.

The lawsuit said that Mr. Blagojevich’s campaign committee got $125,000 in donations from Balmoral-related entities and was scheduled to take in another $100,000 around the time that he was arrested in late 2008 on federal corruption charges. (In 2012, he began serving a 14-year prison sentence.)

After a week-long trial in December, a jury decided in favor of the riverboat casinos, leading to the multimillion-dollar judgment.

In earlier court papers, Balmoral Park’s lawyers called the allegations of extortion “nonsense” and fought the lawsuit.

Money from the riverboat tax, which was created in 2006, has flowed to horsemen and horse-racing track improvements to help make up for the financial hardship that hit Illinois’s horse-racing industry after riverboat gambling was legalized in the 1990s.

Write to Katy Stech at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @katystech