Peter Ecabert

by Jennie Rees, Jon Moss, Peter Ecabert "Eric Hamelback is only carrying out the democratically elected National HBPA board's wishes But no one is more passionate, tireless or bleeds and agonizes more about working for real solutions to our industry's complex problems than Eric." The following was written by Jennie Rees, Jon Moss and Peter Ecabert. The opinions expressed are their own. The National HBPA, of which Eric Hamelback is the CEO and which represents state HBPA affiliates, is virtually the one Thoroughbred entity that has stood up to challenge...

The National Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association (HBPA) filed a Petition for Rulemaking under the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) on Monday, requesting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to create no-effect thresholds. A no-effect threshold, also known as a no-effect screening limit or no-effect cutoff, is a laboratory testing detection level below which no owner or trainer will be punished for innocent and pharmacologically irrelevant concentrations of foreign substances that have no effect on a horse, according to the HBPA. Under the petition, the no-effect thresholds would be required...

Draft language has been inserted into the full-year omnibus spending bill designed to fix a constitutional problem with the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) identified by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found in November that the law as written doesn't afford the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enough authority in the rule-making process. In short, the draft omnibus spending bill cedes the FTC--the governmental agency which ultimately signs off on any new HISA rule--new autonomy to remove, add to and tweak language in the rules constructed by the...

Is the Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) good for horsemen and, by extension, good for racing? Representing the National HBPA, lawyer Peter Ecabert doesn't think that it is, and he was invited to join the TDN Writers' Room podcast presented by Keeneland to explain why. Ecabert was one of two guests on this week's podcast as Len Green, the founder and chairman of the Green Group, came on to share some tax advice and to talk about his soon-to-be-named champion 2-year-old filly Wonder Wheel (Into Mischief). When asked...

The conservative bent of two of the three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit scheduled to hear another case about the constitutionality of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) "does not bode well" for the near-term future of the act, said appellate law expert Lucinda Finley. Oral arguments are set for Dec. 7 in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals for an appeal of an earlier ruling in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. That district court found that HISA was indeed constitutional,...

by Peter Ecabert Bill Finley, in his Mar. 17 TDN opinion piece on the National HBPA challenging the legality of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, wrote: "It's hard to imagine that there is one horseman anywhere who cares one bit whether or not HISA is unconstitutional or not." To Mr. Finley, it doesn't matter if this legislation, ramrodded through to passage with no Senate Committee discussion or debate as a little-known add-on to December's COVID relief bill, is legal or not. Who cares about the law's legality? he asks....