Pleasanton aims to fill void left by Golden Gate Fields’ demise

Pleasanton, Calif.

Can a handful of fairs keep horse racing alive in Northern California following the demise of Golden Gate Fields? We are about to get our first inkling.

The bucolic racetrack in Pleasanton, an affluent suburb 40 miles southeast of San Francisco, will take the first step on that uncertain journey when it opens Friday for its annual meeting coinciding with the Alameda County Fair. The track will conduct 13 days of racing on Fridays through Sundays over four weekends, as well as an added Fourth of July card.

But that is just a warm-up for the main event: After racing rotates among the four other county fairs in California that still run short meets over the summer – Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Fresno and Humboldt County – Pleasanton will host its first-ever fall meeting from Oct. 19 through Dec. 15.

The mission is to give northern horsemen some much-needed stability in the post-Golden Gate world, said Jerome Hoban, CEO of the fairgrounds.

“We’re committed to this for five years,” he said. “Now could we be here three and say, you know it makes more sense right now to go to Sacramento and do something. That could all happen, but right now we’re trying to give everybody some stability and an understanding of what’s going on.

“We’ve just got to make sure we’re not losing money, that we’re serving the community and the horse racing community is taken care of. There are thousands of people whose livelihoods are at stake if horse racing doesn’t continue, not to mention all the horses that would have to be rehomed and sent elsewhere. ”

The expansion of racing at Pleasanton is the result of a furious scramble by the California Association of Racing Fairs to come up with a plan to keep racing alive in the north.

The rush was triggered by the surprise announcement in July 2023 by The Stronach Group’s 1/ST Racing unit that it planned to close Golden Gate Fields at the end of its fall-winter meet in December and focus on Santa Anita Park in the south. A stay of execution negotiated by the California Horse Racing Board gave northern horsemen six additional months to develop a plan, with overtime expiring when Golden Gate ran its final race Sunday.

CARF, a consortium of 13 nonprofit county fairs with live racing or off-track betting facilities, initially hoped to host a fall meeting at Cal-Expo, the state fairgrounds in Sacramento, but that would have required building a costly new harness track inside the main track. Pleasanton soon emerged as Plan B, and the race against the clock was on.

“We decided that we had to give everybody a home and it had to happen quickly,” said Hoban, who also serves as chairman of the CARF board of directors.

Improvements were visible last week at what is billed as the oldest one-mile oval in North America. It opened for racing in 1858, five years before Saratoga’s debut. Using a $4 million credit line extended by the Alameda County fair board, CARF purchased a permanent sound system and scores of televisions and obtained several hundred auxiliary stalls to accommodate most of the 1,000-plus horses expected to compete at the fair meet. It also is in the process of improving track amenities and has enlarged an RV park on the fairgrounds for use by track employees and their families.

CARF also hopes to add a turf course to the infield at Pleasanton, though that would occur at least several years in the future if it happens. Currently the Sonoma County Fair in Santa Rosa, which is not a member of CARF, has the north’s only turf course.

Despite the upgrades, Hoban and CARF racing secretary Tom Doutrich acknowledged in interviews that many hurdles still must be cleared before the revamped northern circuit can be declared a success.

Weather will be one challenge once the fall meeting run by a newly created entity known as Golden State Racing, operated by CARF, opens in October. The Pleasanton grandstand is not weatherized, and fans may not be too keen on sitting outside on cold and rainy days, Hoban said. That could hurt marketing efforts aimed at getting fans in the stands to ensure “we have that vibe and excitement on track,” he said.

Doutrich said CARF also sees an urgent need to raise purses, particularly because Northern California horsemen suffered through a 25 percent purse reduction at Golden Gate’s final meeting and will face smaller cuts at Pleasanton’s fair meet, which is expected to pay an average of between $160,000 and $170,000 a day in purses.

“One of our biggest concerns is these horsemen cannot keep operating with what it costs to run a horse in California,” Doutrich said. “The bottom line is they cannot survive when we’re giving away $160,000 to $170,000 (per day) living in this area, they just can’t.”

But increasing purses will be difficult unless the fairs can boost field sizes, a perennial problem in a state that has seen a decline of more than 65 percent in Cal-bred foals since 2001, compared to a decrease of more than 49 percent nationally over the same period.

The added stabling at the track should help, Doutrich said, as it will mean fewer horses will have to ship in from Sacramento or other facilities to run at Pleasanton, reducing horsemen’s expenses. But he said that CARF also may have to look at reducing the number of racing days in the future to help bolster the number of starters per race.

The fairs also have a potential game-changer that could open an alternate funding spigot to boost purses and thereby attract more horses: the Calypso Challenge, a pari-mutuel-based fantasy sports machine that would link horse races with other sporting contests such as NASCAR races.

Doutrich said the CHRB’s legal team had reviewed the concept and given CARF permission to move forward with the proposal. He said the state attorney general’s office is expected to determine soon whether using a pari-mutuel formula to determine payouts is permissible under California law, which restricts slot machines to tribal casinos.

Another concern mentioned by both Hoban and Doutrich is that efforts by 1/ST Racing and other horse racing factions in Southern California to undermine the fairs’ efforts to keep racing alive in the north may continue. The most visible volley in that campaign came when Craig Fravel, executive vice chairman of 1/ST Racing, wrote a letter to the CHRB in March saying the company would have to re-evaluate its investments in Santa Anita and the San Luis Rey Downs training center if the board approved additional dates for Pleasanton.

Money is at the center of what Hoban called the “quiet resistance to what we’re doing” because legislation sponsored by CARF prevents proceeds from wagering in the region from being used to boost purses in the south while live racing is occurring in the north.

“We’re trying to do something here for the betterment of the horsemen in the north, and to run into that kind of opposition was sad,” Hoban said.

Despite such challenges, Hoban and Doutrich said they are optimistic that the reconfigured northern fair circuit can succeed, particularly since embattled northern horsemen have rallied around the project.

Hoban said nearly all of the 950 or so stalls available for the fair meet are reserved, and he expects a full house when the track adds another 100 or so in time for the fall meet.

And Doutrich said he has been impressed by the resilience he has seen from the north’s embattled horsemen.

“I initially told Larry (Swartzlander, CARF’s executive director) and Jerome that we’d be lucky to run two days a week (because of the shortage of horses),” said Doutrich. “But it’s amazing to see how these guys have rallied and they’re hanging in there. I think it will work if we can get the purse structure right, get the marketing right and the facilities evolve. If we do, this town will support this place. It could be like a mini-Del Mar.”