Carman Williams
cwilliams@weatherforddemocrat.com
The Texas Thoroughbred Association hosted a meeting for leaders in the local horse industry Monday night to promote the new “Horsemen’s Bill.” The meeting, held at Silverado on the Brazos, was one of 11 similar efforts around Texas to promote the bill, which the TTA hopes will change the horse industry in the Lone Star State.
According to TTA president Dr. Jacquelyn Rich, the purpose of the meetings is four-fold: to spread the information about the “Horseman’s Bill,” to answer questions from the horsemen community, to gether feedback from the community, and to collect volunteers to form a grass-roots movement for the bill’s promotion.
Rich said that the idea for the bill came when Texas horsemen noticed a shift in horse business from Texas to neighboring states.
“We decided we were in trouble because our product, the equine industry, was undervalued in the marketplace,” Rich said. She went on to say that the incentives offered by other states (i.e. race winnings and legal gambling) dwarfed incentives offered by Texas businesses, even though she believes it is Texan’s money that funds the other state’s incentives.
Rich noted that last year, 60 registered Quarter Horse Association stallions and many more mares relocated from Texas to Kentucky, and included statistics from the Jockey Club indicating that the number of Thoroughbred stallions and mares in Texas had dropped over 40 per cent in six years, while those numbers had jumped rapidly in Louisiana and New Mexico.
The solution, according to Rich, is the Horsemen’s Bill with its “Good for Texas” provisions.
“There’s not a Shetland pony in a backyard that’s not going to benefit from this,” Rich said.
The TTA has formed a breed coalition with American Quarter Horse Association, the American Paint Horse Association, the National Cutting Horse Association, and the Texas Arabian Breeders Association to pass the bill through legislation.
If the bill is passed, thirteen race tracks in Texas will be licensed for video lottery terminals, and the associations plan to use the video lottery purse fund to pay for the bill provisions. The bill is still being refined, but Rich promised that those provisions would include, among other things, better living conditions and benefits for race track employees.
She also said that the race industry would not be the only one to benefit from the bill. A performance horse development fund would use about 10 percent of the purse fund for non-racing breeds. The AQHA is slated to receive 40 percent of that secondary fund, and the NCHA and APHA are both set to receive 20 percent. The remaining 20 percent would go to the Texas Department of Agriculture, where any horse group could apply for funding.
TTA Executive Director Dave Hooper said that the bill would also benefit the general economy. He stated that for every dollar increase in a race purse, that dollar would multiply seven times in the community.
Rich and Hooper both emphasized that the bill does not promote gambling. They claimed that it wil help cut down the number of illegal gambling sites in Texas and replace them with fewer, taxable gambling sites.
The bill is scheduled to go before legislation in the 2009 session.
