Oregon Racetrack Faces Axing of 226 Workers Without Gaming Machines

An OR racetrack owned by Dutch people Bros coffee billionaire Travis Boersma will lay turned 226 workers next month. That’s unless the say racing charge greenlights its applications programme for 225 historical horse-racing machines.

The ultimatum, firstly reported past Willamette Week, comes as an confederation of ennead Oregon tribal operators continues to pressurise the law-makers to lay gaming elaboration on hold. These include the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, which operates the Seven Feathers Casino Resort, 40 miles due north of Grants Pass.

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

They support exclusivity on slots and cassino gaming under the terms of their compacts with the state. But they sense this flop is beingness threatened past the maturation of historical horse-racing machines, as advantageously as mobile betting, which has been uncommitted via the Oregon Lottery since 2019.

A bank bill that would make established a task drive to examine the future of gaming in the tell stalled inwards the legislature finally year.

Flying Lark on Hold

Following the demise of Portland Meadows in 2019, Grants Pass is now the only if commercial message raceway left inward Oregon.

Boersma is itching to undecided the Flying Lark, a dining, drinking, and gaming ecesis neighboring(a) to the rails that he claims testament transform Grants Pass into an “epicenter of planetary racing.”

But first, he needs those gaming machines.

In a observation to nation authorities seen past Willamette Week, the caterpillar track said it had expected a determination cobbler's last month from the racing commission. But it latterly learned it for the first time needs sign-off from the Oregon Department of Justice, which is holding up the process.

We’ve stippled every ‘i,’ we’ve crossed every ‘t’ — we’ve had numerous conversations with tribe, with land and political figures, soup-to-nuts, top-to-bottom o'er the line of the shoemaker's last threesome years and in that respect has non once been the mention, the idea that we would non follow able to clear our doors,” Boersma told local ABC affiliate KDRV.

“I had a conversation with [employees] in conclusion hebdomad and I had to net ball them live what do and set up are here, and it’s catastrophic for people and their lives,” he added.

Tech Outpacing Regulation

Historical gymnastic horse racing machines take into account players to play on replays of yesteryear races with the identities of the races obscured. They feature been effectual in OR since 2012, but only if at racetracks. That’s because they broadly enjoyment the pari-mutuel betting system of rules permitted at racetracks.

The tribes difference this. In a alphabetic character shoemaker's last Oct to the state’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, they complained the newest generation of machines had “evolved beyond the pari-mutuel system of rules to the peak where they are “nothing other than one-armed bandit machines, from a participant perspective.”

“The state’s regulatory fabric has not evolved to shine new technology or its impacts on the public,” the tribes wrote. “We are at a vital mo where the say is nigh to approve the largest enlargement of state-regulated gaming inward decades without public or legislative input.”