Horsemen eagerly await cash infusion from slots gambling

Mark Scolforo

Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2004 | 9:20 a.m.

GRANTVILLE, Pa. -- Behind a chain-link fence and far from the view of gamblers at Penn National Race Course is a decaying complex of 27 battered red barns and weed-lined gravel roads -- an area known as "The Backside."

Improvements are on the way to the area where grooms, jockeys, trainers and horse owners make a living year-round by preparing the 1,200 horses that race there. The track has races four nights a week, a frustrating exercise in losing money in recent years.

The math simply does not add up: Penn National's yearly purses amount to $12.7 million, but it costs an average of $15,000 to keep each horse exercised, healthy, fed, clean and shod.

"We know for a fact that the people who participate in racing here are going to share in a $5 million yearly loss," said Todd Mostoller, executive director of the track horsemen's association. "That has been the case for the last six, seven, eight years."

Many of those people, he said, were about ready to cash in their chips before the General Assembly legalized slot-machine gambling in July.

The legislation directed part of the hundreds of millions of dollars in expected gambling revenue into the horse racing industry in the form of fattened purses, health insurance and pensions for horsemen. It also earmarked millions for mandated improvements to the backsides at Penn National, Philadelphia Park, The Meadows and Pocono Downs.

Trainer Rick Wasserman, who has operated out of Penn National since 1979, termed the slots legislation "as big as anything that's ever happened" to the state's horse-racing industry. He currently keeps 12 horses at Penn National among the backside's patched roofs, dilapidated fences and well-worn horse paths.

"It's basically not in bad shape for 30 years (old),"' he said. "But there's room for improvement."

Using gambling proceeds to prop up the state's deteriorating horse-racing industry was an objective of legalized slots even before negotiators agreed to divert one-third of the projected $3 billion in annual proceeds for property-tax relief. The law that eventually emerged established the Pennsylvania Race Horse Development Fund, into which the 14 casinos will eventually pay nearly 9 percent of their proceeds.

Eighty percent of the fund will go toward purses, the lifeblood of racing. At Philadelphia Park in Bensalem, total daily purses are expected to shoot up from about $120,000 to $400,000, said Larry Riviello, president of the horsemen's association at the track.

"It's going to be a big, big improvement," he said. "It's like you're going to a workplace of satisfaction."

The state's breeders will get 16 percent and the remaining 4 percent will finance health and pension benefits for owners, trainers, their employees and their families.

Track owners also must invest $5 million annually in backside improvements for the first five years, then between $250,000 and $1 million a year for the following five years. It's unclear how the tracks will divide up the money among needs that include new barns, renovations to the existing barns, better manure collection systems and a long list of maintenance issues.

But one area sorely in need of fixing up are the cramped quarters where the highly transient population of grooms, many of them immigrants, live. Grooms earn about $400 a week.

At Penn National, their homes are a row of tiny boxlike apartments that lack air conditioning and onsite plumbing. During a recent tour of the backside, Mostoller declined to let a reporter examine the interiors or talk to the grooms, citing privacy concerns.

Spokesman Fred Lipkin said planning for the backside upgrades at Penn National is on hold until the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, which has not held its first meeting, establishes some standards.

For the horsemen trying to scratch out a living on the backside, that can't happen soon enough.