I wanted to know whether this year I could do what I have done almost every year on my birthdaybet the ponies.
It is just past 10 a.m. when I walk in, and the regulars are already at it, studying the Racing Form, making their notations before rushing to the cage to put down money on the next race.
I am here to see Karen Cloud, who with her brother Randy has run Red & Jerry’s, the enormous off-track betting and sports bar in Sheridan, for 13 years. She has just returned from the Capitol, where she was monitoring Senate Bill 174, which, she insists, will decide the fate of her business.
SB 174 is a complicated, yet simple bill that will yield no winner.
It would allow additional days of greyhound and horse-racing simulcasts, likely killing the Colorado greyhound-racing industry, but letting places like Cloud’s thrive. That will ensure I can celebrate my birthday betting on ponies.
It will be heard by the full Senate this week.
The bill has triggered a split between the state’s betting industry and greyhound kennel operators, who fear allowing greyhound simulcasts without live racing will finish off their struggling industry in Colorado.
The bill would allow Red & Jerry’s to take bets throughout the year, rather than the 250 days state law now permits.
It also would allow Cloud to resume simulcasts of greyhound racing from around the country, a practice she had to halt when the last of Colorado’s live greyhound meets went dark last June.
Limited to horse-racing simulcasts, attendance at Red & Jerry’s has fallen sharply. She says the rule that greyhound racing can be simulcast only if there is a live event in Colorado must be lifted for her to remain in business.
“It simply costs too much money to run live events.”
She would know. Her grandparents, Inez (“Red” she was dubbed, for her flaming red hair) and Jerry, opened Rocky Mountain Greyhound Park in Colorado Springs in 1949. The family ran it for 53 years.
“Back then, it was a great business. It was really the thing to do, except go to the movies or the day the rodeo came to town,” she said. “Two thousand people a night would come. In recent years, maybe 40 would.”
If allowed to simulcast dogs and horses year-round, Cloud virtually swoons at the thought of the people she could hire, the events she could stage beyond wrestling matches and quinceañeras she books now to stay afloat.
To Bruce Seymore, executive director of Mile High Racing and Entertainment, a failure of SB 174 means the end of horse-race betting in Colorado. He can’t imagine off-track-betting places like his can survive on horses alone.
Without the bill, thousands of people will be out of jobs and millions of dollars of revenue to Colorado lost, he said.
Seymore said the company lost $700,000 on the last full greyhound meet at Mile High Park.
Since 2000, he said, 19 dog tracks in the U.S. have closed, not including two scheduled to close in Massachusetts next year.
“It is just more proof the dog-racing business model doesn’t work,” Seymore said. “The greyhound people are nice people, but they don’t want anything in that dying business to change.”
Eric Morgan, executive director of the Colorado Greyhound Kennel Association, says his membership objects only to the bill’s provision allowing dog-racing simulcasts from around the country. It would kill them, he said.
“Without a live-greyhound-racing provision, this legislation would put my clients out of business. Forever. No bill should ever do that.”
My guess is that without SB 174 passing, everybody in both industries will be flat out of business in Colorado. Forever.
And that would make for one very lousy birthday present.
Bill Johnson writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at wjohnson@denverpost.com or 303-954-2763.
