By T. D. Thornton
The New Jersey Racing Commission voted 6-0 Wednesday not to act as a middleman on behalf of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) by collecting fees from state licensees that will eventually fund the yet-to-get started authority's drug-testing and safety initiatives.
The decision was hardly a surprise, and it yielded zero public discussion among commissioners prior to the perfunctory vote.
It had seemed unlikely that the NJRC would be the first regulator in the nation to willingly craft a complex set of rules and set up a payment-collecting process from scratch to fund a work-in-progress ruling body whose July 1 start date looms in the shadow of two federal lawsuits aiming to get HISA voided on constitutional grounds before its programs even go into effect.
Judith Nason, the NJRC's executive director, said at the Mar. 23 meeting that the HISA Act authorizes its authoritative body to impose fees on “covered persons” to pay for anti-doping and safety programs, and that those fees will be calculated on a yet-to-be-determined, proportionate, state-by-state basis depending on how much racing takes place in each state.
Also under the HISA law, Nason said individual state racing commissions may elect to collect the HISA fees from that state's industry participants and then remit those fees to HISA. But if a state commission wants to opt in on that process, she added, it has to notify HISA by May 1.
Nason noted that it would be up to each opting-in state to come up with its own method of assessing and collecting fees from licensees. And since New Jersey currently has no statute, rule or contact in place that spells out that process, the commission would have to go through the difficult work of proposing its own system—which would never happen in time for the May 1 opt-in date, based on how long it takes to get rules passed in New Jersey, Nason added.
Nason told commissioners prior to the roll call that the NJRC staff recommended that the commission vote not to collect the fees. The vote was then unanimous to follow that recommendation.
Although the commission's vote doesn't change a thing in the way it does business, the NJRC now at least has it on the record that it didn't want to be the bill collector for a program that is being opposed by several other state racing commissions and the National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association in two similar but separate lawsuits.
No New Jersey commissioners articulated their views on what might happen in the near term regarding HISA. But Nason did shed some light on the process when prompted during the public commentary portion of the meeting after the vote.
“It's really up to HISA to figure out how they want to assess the racing industry. And the question for the NJRC was whether we wanted to insert ourselves in that process. And we politely declined,” Nason said.
Responding to a follow-up query, Nason added that it's unlikely New Jersey licensees will be hit up twice at some point in the future to pay for drug-testing costs (as in having to pay once to the NJRC, then again to HISA during the same time frame).
“Pursuant to state statute, the NJRC can assess permit-holders for our racing costs,” Nason explained. “When HISA gets up and running, once they take over an issue such as the anti-doping and medication control program, they will be able to bill the racing licensees for their costs, and the NJRC will be pre-empted—we will not be able to bill. So it will be a shift from the permit-holders paying us to however HISA wants to collect those fees directly from the racing industry.”
Fall dates swap
The NJRC also voted 6-0 to approve the change of two 2022 Thoroughbred dates from the Meadowlands to Monmouth Park.
What would have been the final two programs of the all-turf Thoroughbred meet at the Meadowlands (Friday and Saturday, Oct. 28 and 29) got swapped out for two additional Sundays at Monmouth (Sept. 11 and 18), the latter of which will be the new closing day of the meet. The request was made by Monmouth's management.
Thoroughbred racing at those two Jersey tracks will get a nine-date boost this season compared to 2021.
Monmouth's opening day is May 7 for the 62-date meet. The nine-date Meadowlands grass meet begins Sept. 23.
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