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Sunday, May. 17, 2009

No time to be cautious on racing

House Speaker Greg Stumbo ranks high on the savviest-politician-in-Kentucky-at-the-moment scale.

But when it comes to getting expanded gambling legislation through the General Assembly, his instincts strike me as inferior to those of his sidekick, Speaker Pro Tem Larry Clark.

Stumbo remains reluctant to call a House vote on his proposal to authorize slots at racetracks without some assurance that the measure has a good chance to pass the Senate. Clark says he will follow Stumbo's lead on this issue. But he also has said he would prefer to pass the bill out of the House and "let the Senate have the blood on their hands" if it fails.

If Clark had wanted to be more specific, he could have said the blood would be on the hands of Senate President David Williams, who maintains tight control of the General Assembly's upper chamber.

Stumbo understandably doesn't want to put House members at too much risk on a contentious issue. But as he noted last week, "The urgency of (Kentucky racetracks') situation requires that we do something immediately if we're going to save our racing industry in this state. ... I'm not sure some of our tracks can even open this year."

That very urgency represents the best argument for the House adopting the more aggressive approach preferred by Clark.

Kentucky's signature $4 billion industry is collapsing before our eyes. If you find yourself in a traffic jam on a northbound or eastbound interstate these days, the number of vans hauling Kentucky horses to the racino tracks in Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia could be a contributing factor.

"The problem is real," Churchill Downs spokesman Kevin Flanery told the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission last week, while asking the panel to cut seven days of racing from the track's current meet. "It's here today. It's not coming next week."

Flanery later told reporters the "legacy of Kentucky" is at stake in the current crisis for the state's Thoroughbred industry.

Stumbo gets it in regard to racing's woes. "If we had another industry ... that employed 100,000 people and if it were a factory and it were in trouble, we'd be rushing to it as a government, trying to figure out ways to keep it viable," he said after he and Clark discussed the issue with Gov. Steve Beshear last week.

Beshear gets it, too. "We've long cherished the title of the horse capital of the world, and I don't want to lose that title," he told reporters after that meeting, adding that the Kentucky racing industry is "getting close to being in free fall. I think it would be tragic if we don't do everything we can to prevent that."

But Beshear remains as cautious as Stumbo, declining to commit to putting slots legislation on the agenda of the special session he is expected to call next month to deal with the state's revenue woes.

There are times for caution, to be sure. But there are also times to throw caution to the wind.

In a marvelous description of Calvin Borel's jaw-dropping ride on the gelding Mine That Bird in the 135th Kentucky Derby, Sports Illustrated's Tim Layden wrote these words:

"What took place next was stunning. Borel passed 18 horses in 21 explosive seconds. He shot by General Quarters on the rail, swept outside past Atomic Rain, ducked inside, and just past the three-sixteenths pole squeezed through a tiny gap between Join in the Dance and the rail. Mine That Bird has no stones, but Borel's are big enough for both of them."

With Kentucky's racing industry on the verge of suffering a level of damage from which it can never recover, this is no time for the industry's supporters in Frankfort to be cautious. This is the time for them to show a bit of Calvin "Bo-rail's," uh, moxie.

As long as House Democrats let Williams' personal opposition to expanded gambling and his comments about there being no "sentiment" for it in the Senate intimidate them into inaction, he never has to back up his words.

More important, given his autocratic control of the Senate, he never has to face the possibility of being held personally responsible for not giving a $4 billion signature industry that employs more than 100,000 Kentuckians the tools it needs to remain competitive with the racinos and what impact that responsibility might have on his own future political ambitions and the re-election chances of some of his caucus members who help keep him in power, particularly in Northern Kentucky where Turfway Park is at risk and the public avidly supports expanded gambling.

Clark has the right idea. Put Williams on the spot. Send a piece of gambling legislation over to the west end of the Capitol's third floor, and let him decide if he wants the racing industry's blood on his hands for the rest of his life.