Churchill Downs Inc. moved one step closer to getting out of the horse racing business in Florida after an appeals court ruled the company could use its license for a jai alai fronton to operate a casino at Calder in Miami Springs.
Three judges in Florida’s First District Court of Appeal on Wednesday upheld a decision by the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering allowing Churchill Downs Inc. to tie its Calder Casino to a jai alai permit it acquired in 2018. Calder opened the casino after a constitutional amendment and a local referendum were passed, giving existing pari-mutuel license holders in South Florida the option to install slot machines. At the time the state law passed in 2004, Calder Race Course was a Thoroughbred racetrack.
Since that time, however, Churchill Downs Inc. tore down the track’s grandstand and much of the stable area and since 2014 has leased the track and a portion of stabling to The Stronach Group, which operates at Calder under the name Gulfstream Park West.
That lease expires in 2020.
Churchill Downs Inc. began offering pari-mutuel wagering on jai alai in a newly constructed building adjacent to the Calder Casino in May 2019 and asked the Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering for permission to tie its slots license to that activity instead of horse racing.
In making its ruling, the court wrote that “Nothing in the plain language of (state law enabling slots at pari-mutuel facilities) requires a facility to continue the same form of pari-mutuel wagering activity that originally qualified it for a slot machine license; nor does this statute tie an ‘eligible facility’ to the same type of racing or gaming as it had when the constitutional amendment was approved.”
The DIvision of Pari-Mutuel Wagering decision was appealed by Florida Thoroughbred owners and breeders, but the Court of Appeal rejected their arguments.
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