Deal to keep slots, racing at Downs is still murky

Kawartha Downs racetrack appears to have won its high-stakes gamble for survival.

KD and its hard-bargaining general manager, Orazio Valente, over the past year rejected two Ontario government offers intended to keep the track and harness racing afloat.

One was a $200,000 boost to the track’s annual subsidy to make up for the loss of its slot machines to a new, larger casino about to open in Peterborough.

More recently, Valente initially said no to an offer to keep 150 slot machines at the track.

He insisted that 250 machines were necessary to generate enough revenue to keep the harness racing operation viable.

Now KD has accepted the 150 slot machines and Valente says harness racing will be back next season.

Whether that means the 250 figure was just bargaining for a better deal, or whether the province has offered an additional sweetener, is not known.

In fact, very little has been revealed about how this new arrangement will work.

Best case, it is a win for everyone involved.

The local harness racing community gets to keep racing with purses large enough to make it worth their while.

Thirty KD restaurant, service and security staff employees get to keep their jobs.

Cavan Monaghan Township could, it would appear, continue to get a share of casino revenue.

And Premier Doug Ford and MPP Laurie Scott, whose riding includes Cavan Monaghan, get to say they “saved harness racing in Ontario.”

Check that.

Even if the still murky deal works out on all those local levels, the Progressive Conservative government doesn’t get to expand its role to saviour of harness racing.

What Premier Ford and company have done is extend a bailout by the former Liberal government that already pays the racing industry more than $105 million a year, plus millions more to make up for the loss of slots revenue.

The majority of Ontario tracks signed on to the Liberal plan and are operating as they always have. Kawartha Down was one of the few outliers.

As a small, rural track, KD had good reason to look for a better deal.

When it lost the slots it lost nearly $6.5 million in gambling revenue. A total of $1.5 million in annual subsidies wouldn’t be enough to survive on.

But it is not clear that 150 slot machines will do it – one-third of the previous total – will do it either. Particularly when the Shorelines Casino opens Monday just down the road in Peterborough with 500 slots and 22 table games including blackjack and roulette.

That brings up another possible twist in the story. Shorelines is owned by Great Canadian Gaming Corp., which also won the right to build a mega-casino in Pickering with 2,700 slots and 1,000 gaming tables.

That venture came at the expense of Ajax Downs racetrack, which lost its slots operations to the Pickering site.

But as with KD, Ajax Down has just been told it can now keep 500 of its 800 slot machines. They will be operated by . . . Great Canadian Gaming.

Will both gambling centres here be run by the same operator? Will the Tories offer other Ontario tracks slot machines?

There is a fair bit of wait-and-see in what the “saviour” has put on the table so far.

As a small, rural track, KD had good reason to look for a better deal.