An American Lion

Did you know there was horse racing in central Maryland? Neither did I, but I’ve had to live with it:

For more than a decade, people in the Maryland horse racing industry have dreamed that their sport could be revived by the legalization of slot machines. Those hopes were crushed Monday night.

When the Anne Arundel County Council approved a slot machine complex at the Arundel Mills shopping mall, its vote signified that Laurel Park won’t get slots. The council’s decision will surely be followed by legal challenges and endless political wrangling, but if the decision stands, its consequences seem clear:

Laurel will not survive as a venue for live horse racing. Year-round racing — or anything close to it — will be finished in the state. The sport will be reduced to a relatively short season at Pimlico, which will survive only because of the profitability of the Preakness.

This was hardly the outcome that the state expected when it crafted a slot-machine referendum that voters approved in November 2008. The language authorized slots at an Anne Arundel County site that everyone assumed would be Laurel Park. It directed that a percentage of revenue from slot machines would be earmarked for purse money as well as awards for breeders. With salvation in its grasp, the Magna Entertainment Corp. — owner of Laurel and Pimlico — made a disastrous decision. When bids for slot licenses were due last February, Magna declined to put up the required $28.5 million payment that was supposed to accompany its proposal.

The Baltimore-based Cordish Companies did pay the money as it submitted its longshot bid for slot development at Arundel Mills. When the state slots commission disqualified Magna, Cordish got the slot franchise, subject to the County Council’s approval which — after a tortuous political process — came Monday night.

Excellent news!

Tear down Laurel Park and banish these horse people from Central Maryland. I have never seen a place that housed more degradation and filth. Every time I try to go somewhere, I have a horse transporter in my way, lollygagging and dispersing hay all over the road. Every time I try to go through Laurel, vagrants with whiskey bottles stumble across Route 1 on their way to the track so they can bet two dollars on Nincompoop Nag or Fleeced Lightning in the fifth. Odious toadies abound.

Tear down the track and put in a member’s only golf course. Take that entire strip of Route 1 and burn it to the ground and start over. Send the vagrants to Columbia so they can live by the mall and eat donuts on the sidewalk all day.

God, I hate horse people. I really, really do. Is that a flaw? No, that’s a feature with me.