NYRA 2017 Budget Sees Small Handle Decrease

As the New York Racing Association's board is scheduled to meet Dec. 14 for the first time in more than four months, a bill lawmakers passed intended to pressure Gov. Andrew Cuomo to return NYRA to private hands sits among the few pieces of legislation not yet delivered to the governor for his consideration.

The state-controlled NYRA board meets Wednesday to consider its 2017 budget proposal, which anticipates a small drop in pari-mutuel handle. The document was not posted on NYRA's web site until Dec. 13.

The total gross parimutuel handle is projected to be off 1.5% in 2017 compared with this year in a pot of funds that includes revenues from on-track and simulcast operations. Total net revenue from racing is projected at $159.9 million in 2017, off 1.6% from 2016. In its brief set of documents posted online, NYRA said it "intentionally budgeted conservatively" for 2017.

NYRA said it is also forecasting 226 race dates in 2017, down from 237 in 2015; hit sharpest is the winter 2017 Aqueduct meet, where 57 days are projected, down 16% from the past five-year average.

Meanwhile, salaries and other labor costs are set to grow 4.6%, due in part to collective bargaining agreements and additional staff hiring to "support strategic objectives."

There is little doubt how Cuomo will react to the privatization bill when it is sent to him in the coming weeks—a veto. The legislation, passed in June by both legislative houses as an act of defiance by Democrats and Republicans to the governor, was supplanted weeks later with a compromise measure the sides all approved that simply extended the state's oversight of the NYRA board for another year. The governor led a NYRA takeover of the NYRA board in 2012 in what was to be a three-year reorganization period; the state will now run NYRA until at least sometime in 2017.

From hundreds of bills that passed the Legislature this year, only 25—including Senate bill number 7918—has not been sent to Cuomo yet for him to sign or veto. The measure called for reducing the governor's domination of NYRA's board selections, giving most of a new NYRA board's picks to the industry. Lawmakers enacted that measure after Cuomo proposed an end to the state's oversight period, though with a number of provisions that lawmakers and NYRA backers called poison pills; they included keeping the governor ostensibly in control of the NYRA board and capping annual revenues that NYRA receives from the Aqueduct casino operations, which have supplanted ever-dwindling racing handle revenues.

Sen. John Bonacic, the Republican chairman of the Senate racing and wagering committee, said this week the Legislature tried in June to convince Cuomo to again privatize NYRA, but no agreement could be reached. In the end, the sides did another one-year extender of the oversight period. "As such, I do not expect the governor to sign my bill ... into law,'' Bonacic said of the privatization bill okayed by the Legislature and not yet sent to Cuomo.

The Legislature has until Dec. 20 to send Cuomo the final 25 bills to meet a timetable that requires the governor to affirmatively sign or veto them by Dec. 31; those sent to him and not acted upon at all then automatically become law. Those sent to him after Dec. 20 allows the governor another 30 days to consider them; if he does not act on any of those during that period, they are automatically vetoed under New York's seldom-used "pocket veto" system.