Gray’s legislation will help clarify complicated relationship between horse racing and gaming
The Merced Sun-Star editorial “Gray’s deal a sure winner for casinos, tracks,” criticizing legislation introduced by Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, seeking to regulate internet poker, misses several important points.
On behalf of the California Fair Network, we appreciate the assemblyman’s leadership in this complex and contentious subject area. Like several other legislative leaders sent to Sacramento from the San Joaquin Valley, including the late senators Rose Ann Vuich and Ken Maddy, Gray sees the intricate and multiform relationship between horse racing, gaming, agriculture and fairs. The Internet Poker Consumer Protection Act, introduced by Gray, as currently written, would ensure that a set portion of funds generated by Internet poker benefit both fairgrounds that host horse racing and smaller nonracing fairs.
Here are a few points:
▪ Gambling on smartphones is already here – it’s called fantasy sports betting – and the lack of regulated public policy in this area has implications for several sectors, including fairs and agriculture.
▪ Gray knows that the lack of coordinated policy surrounding the development of tribal gaming in California had several unexpected side effects, including a decline of the horse-racing sector, which in turn has harmed agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley and led to the collapse of funding for California’s 76 fairgrounds.
▪ Gray’s legislation seeks to mitigate further damage by recognizing the potential negative impact in advance, and provide a way for racing, fairs and agriculture to benefit from the new activity – Internet poker.
▪ California has no central place for the development of gaming policy. We have a California Horse Racing Board, a California Lottery Commission, the attorney general regulating card rooms, and the governor negotiating with tribes for casino expansion. All of these activities impact each other, and have serious implications for fairs, farms and workers throughout the state. As chair of the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee, Gray is using his leadership position to do exactly what we need leaders to do – lead!
His AB 2863 is an effort to bring several important sectors together, groups that, frankly, rarely agree on anything.
If you drive down Highway 99 from Sacramento to Bakersfield, you will pass dozens of fairs (some with off-track betting), card rooms, tribal casinos and farms reliant on a struggling horse-racing industry. Finding solutions that work for these varied interests is important and a true test of leadership – a test that Assemblyman Gray is passing with flying colors.
Stephen Chambers is executive director of the Western Fairs Association, a nonprofit trade association serving the fair industry throughout the western United States and Canada.
This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 11:10 AM with the headline "Gray’s legislation will help clarify complicated relationship between horse racing and gaming."