Week In Review: Ferndale Sacrificed for the Hope of Saving California

[Wandering Eyes]

The folks who fought to preserve racing at the Northern California's remote half-miler in Ferndale deserve tremendous respect and credit for soldiering on to the bitter end.

Make no mistake, the cessation of racing at the Humboldt County Fairgrounds in the coastal region of NorCal definitely rates as “bitter.”

There is no sugarcoating this one like a sticky tuft of cotton candy from the midway of Humboldt County's charmingly rural fairgrounds, whose ties to the sport date to 1896. Advocates for racing at Ferndale (pop. 1,398), a Victorian village with an agricultural bent and an artistic vibe nestled between California's redwood region and its fabled Lost Coast, went down swinging at last Thursday's California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) meeting.

For three consecutive months, proponents tried to convince commissioners to extend a lifeline in the form of a 2025 race dates allocation. Out-of-the-way Ferndale has traditionally been the most pastoral, yet vibrantly eclectic, stop on a regional circuit that, as recently as two years ago, was comprised of five seasonal racing fairs anchored by one commercial track, Golden Gate Fields.

In recent months, backers of racing at Pleasanton and Fresno have been similarly rebuffed by the CHRB. None of the applicants who got shot down had wanted to go it alone. Rather, they were trying to hold together what remained of the NorCal circuit that toppled under the weight of the 2023 decision by The Stronach Group (TSG) to shutter Golden Gate.

It wasn't just an issue of Ferndale wanting to race on six dates over three weekends in October (when the county fair itself wouldn't even be operational). That was the Ferndale backers' attempt at a calendar compromise at the June 19 meeting, because the CHRB had already shot down a request last month for Ferndale's traditional late August time slot, when its fair would be in full swing.

The voting focused more on which entity–Ferndale or the Southern California tracks–would get to reap the simulcast-revenue privileges that go with any dates allotment that the CHRB grants.

TSG also owns Santa Anita Park. That prominent SoCal track, along with Del Mar Thoroughbred Club and the Thoroughbred Owners of California (TOC), has lobbied hard for centralizing all of the state's racing and simulcast revenues in the South on a single circuit that also includes Los Alamitos Race Course.

That plan, they argue, is the last, best hope to try and salvage statewide racing before California slides completely off the Thoroughbred grid.

They allege that there aren't enough horses and that there is too little NorCal customer interest and money for purses to keep the two-tiered regional approach viable.

NorCal supporters have cited the denial of dates to the last remaining tracks that want to cater to smaller outfits as a long-term blow to the overall health of the sport in the state and a possible death knell to the fairs themselves.

They are firm in their belief that it's a mistake to concentrate the entirety of the state's racing in one, largely urban geographic area in the South, and they contend that if NorCal racing goes dark for good, the state's already thinning foal crop will dwindle even further, because the North is where the bulk of the breeding farms are.

Additionally, NorCal proponents have articulated complaints that neither the statewide TOC nor the CHRB are representing their interests.

Both sides raise valid, legitimate points.

But considering what has happened in the past 12 months–Golden Gate Fields has closed; an entity called Golden State Racing failed to run a financially viable extended autumn meet at Pleasanton; the California Authority of Racing Fairs (CARF) shifted away from supporting any live meets at county fairs, and three willing NorCal fairs tracks backed by a new investment group, Bernal Park Racing, have all been denied dates applications–you wonder if TSG might be having second thoughts about pulling the plug on Golden Gate.

Perhaps it's fair to state that the disintegration of the NorCal circuit was just a matter of time given the disheartening business trends that are driving other national racetrack closures.

But, like a fateful losing move in a game of high-stakes Jenga, the circuit-toppling decision by TSG to end racing at Golden Gate put California racing more immediately in the path of peril.

You can't really throw the CHRB under the bus for its role in the outcome, either. In each of the past three months that the NorCal agenda items have come up at the board's meetings, it was clear that commissioners were struggling with “damned if we do, damned if we don't” choices.

All versions of the CHRB's votes on the NorCal meets at the May and June meetings came down to 4-3 decisions, and several commissioners expressed that they had a tough time figuring out what was the right thing to do.

It remained fresh in the minds of commissioners that last year, the CHRB okayed a venture to greenlight what ended up being a fiscally disastrous Golden State Racing meet at Pleasanton.

Larry Swartzlander, then in his capacity of executive director for CARF, had pushed hard for trying something new with that 2024 Pleasanton meet. He stoically absorbed his share of criticism for the failed venture when it didn't work out.

Yet Swartzlander, who stepped away from CARF earlier this year after 27 years with that organization and is now working as the director of racing for the fledgling Bernal team, continued to champion NorCal fairs racing into 2025.

Prior to Thursday's vote-down of the meets at Ferndale and Fresno, no stakeholders or commissioners disagreed with the veteran race-meet organizer when Swartzlander underscored that it was imperative to keep some semblance of racing alive in that region this year if there was to be any NorCal future to build upon for 2026.

Swartzlander believed his plan was viable for 2025 because the proposal would have given NorCal a six-week block of dates that he estimated would attract roughly 350 out-of-state horses.

Turf Paradise racetrack | Coady

He said it was advantageous that the Fresno and Ferndale meets would fall on the calendar near the conclusion of the Emerald Downs meet near Seattle and other tracing fairs in the Mountain West region, but before Turf Paradise and Zia Park opened for late-fall racing in the Southwest.

With what Swartzlander said was the backing of Santa Rosa and Pleasanton to once again host possible meets next summer, he explained that “in 2026, I would come back to you with a block of dates from mid-June to mid-October” based on a four-track circuit.

California racehorse owner George Schmitt, who formed Bernal in partnership with another longtime in-state owner/breeder, John Harris, has repeatedly emphasized at CHRB meetings that by taking on the operational duties at the NorCal fairs that were recently abandoned by CARF, his entrepreneurial group was fine with shouldering the high risks of a long-shot venture.

“Bernal Park Racing has the financial support behind it to take care of all the requirements up front,” Schmitt told the CHRB on Thursday. “And if the fairs don't make enough money to pay us back what we forward up for them to run their fairs, we'll take a loss. The state of California is no longer on the hook for anything with any of the fairs.”

Let's put aside for the moment whether or not you think trying to kick-start NorCal again is a cogent or viable endeavor for California as a whole.

Looking at the bigger picture, there's no escaping that Thoroughbred racing in America is mired in an era of contraction in which tracks, many of them corporately controlled, are either slashing race dates or attempting to completely get out from under the burden of subsidizing horses running around in circles.

Just last week, 48 hours before the CHRB votes on Ferndale and Fresno, the sport's headlines were dominated by the news that the gaming company Churchill Downs, Inc. (CDI) had fairly quickly wrangled concessions out of Louisiana horsemen that included purse cuts for the upcoming 2025-26 meet at Fair Grounds.

Those clawbacks were the result of CDI, on June 9, threatening to abandon racing at the historic New Orleans track because a series of recent gaming-related decisions in the Louisiana courts and legislature didn't go its way.

Considering that CDI, in the past decade, has made good on threats to pull out of racing at two other high-profile tracks over alleged profitability issues, its intimidating tactics have become a familiar page out of the gaming company's corporate playbook that come with very real follow-through consequences.

So what's the point with this digression?

The chief takeaway is that at a time when corporations and conglomerates like CDI (which in the past 20 years has closed Arlington and Calder and unloaded Hollywood Park to the land developer that later razed it) and TSG (which has ended racing at Golden Gate and Portland Meadows and this year threatened to do the same at Gulfstream), are putting into place exit strategies, it's amazing that there are still individuals out there who want to make a go of running racetracks.

You think there are problems now with the Ferndales and Fresnos of our racing ecosystem practically begging for a handful of race dates? What do you think it will be like when no one is willing to step up and take on the daunting gamble of giving horses a place to race?

Last Thursday, after making his case to the CHRB and answering all questions that commissioners had for him, Swartzlander  approached the microphone one final time to address the board with what he said was a “personal” comment.

“My wife asked me last night, which many people do, 'Why do you do it?'” Swartzlander said.

The retired lieutenant colonel who spent 21 years of service in the U.S. Army then paused, trying his best to keep his emotions in check.

“Cause I love it,” Swartzlander said, his voice dropping to a barely audible whisper.

“I want to put people back to work. To save racing in California,” Swartzlander said.

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