They kicked off the Year of The Horse with festivities in Chicago’s Chinatown but the people who run the metropolitan area’s harness tracks and the harness horsemen haven’t joined in the celebration. The 2014 Illinois racing calendar called for 11 months of racing, with Balmoral Park set to begin its meeting on Feb. 5 and its sister track, Maywood Park, on Feb. 6. A month has passed, not a single horse has left the starting gate and the fortune cookies offer no clue on when racing will begin. The reason for the protracted delay isn’t the unusually cold and snowy Chicago winter. It’s because of the inability of Balmoral/Maywood management and the board of directors of the Illinois Harness Horsemen’s Association to agree on a 2014 contract. How to spend the approximately $5.5 million in the Balmoral/Maywood purse account is at the heart of the dispute. UPDATE--Dispute Settled: http://www.drf.com/news/harness-racing-balmoral-maywood-agree-terms-horsemen Balmoral president John Johnston and his brother, Maywood president Duke Johnston, want to cut purses and reduce race dates in order to ensure that they will be able to race into 2016. IHHA president Dave McCaffrey and his board of directors want to extend the 2013 contract, even though doing so would deplete the purse account before this year ends. Both sides are in complete agreement on one thing: legalizing slot machines at the racetracks and putting a portion of the revenue in the purse account would solve their problems. If slots aren’t permitted they’d probably settle for an “impact fee” assessment on the state’s biggest revenue-earning riverboat casinos, with a portion of the money going to purses. A similar impact fee arrangement a few years ago put much-needed money in the purse account but now that subsidy is almost depleted. “The only antidote to our illness is some kind of legislative help (slots, impact fee etc.),” said McCaffrey in one of his daily messages to his constituents on the IHHA website. “If we don’t get these, we’re left to decide two things: how long do we want to live (somewhere between seven and 22 months) and what do we want our quality of life to be between now and the end (big purse cuts and a longer life or no purse cuts and a shorter life)?” John Johnston’s rebuttal: “We want to spread the money and get through three more legislative sessions (hoping that one of them will pass a slots-at-the-racetracks bill). They want us to expedite the purse fund in a period as little as six months and no more than a year and then leave us and the remaining horsemen high and dry.” The tracks’ latest proposal—an appeal posted on the Balmoral web-site on Wednesday afternoon asking horsemen to enter their horses as individuals and begin racing at Maywood on March 14—was unanimously voted down that evening by the IHHA board of directors when IHHA president Dave McCaffrey conducted a conference call. “The proposal is silent on the number of races that will be conducted on a weekly basis but requires a minimum of seven-horse fields,” McCaffrey wrote in his IHHA website statement. “Since their offer also states that racing will begin on a Friday, are we to expect there will be no racing on Wednesdays and Thursdays during the mediation process? To blindly agree to a proposal like the one posted is at best a return to many bad deals in the past and at worst a recipe for disaster.” No thaw in the dispute appears to be imminent, despite the repeated efforts of Illinois Racing Board chairman Bill Berry, fellow board members and executive director Marc Laino to mediate. “I personally have been involved in countless negotiating sessions as has the chairman of the board and other board members as well,” Laino said. “The board is actively engaged in trying to get this dispute resolved. “Unfortunately, we remain at an impasse. The parties are still apart on one or more issues. “The chairman has decided to move this to professional mediation. We’re going to get a list of potential mediators. We’ll offer five or six individuals. Both sides will rank their top three choices and then we’ll go from there. It will be depend on the mediator’s schedule and the availability of the parties.” Another thorny unresolved issue is purse recapture. In Johnston’s opinion, the current impasse “is all about recapture and most people don’t know what it is or understand it.” “Recapture” is the name given to a provision in the law that brought full card simulcasting to Illinois in 1995. If total Illinois handle on Illinois races in any year is less than 75% of the total 1994 live handle, tracks can deduct 2% of the amount from purses. It turns out the horsemen were blindsided. Because their purse accounts were taking a significant unforeseen hit, beginning in 1999 the legislature mandated that the state reimburse horsemen for the 2% being “recaptured” by the racetracks by taking money from the General Fund and giving it to the Department of Agriculture to distribute. But after three years, with Illinois government having enormous financial problems, the state stopped channeling reimbursement payments to purse accounts. [DRF HARNESS: LIKE us on Facebook and get timely updates on the latest harness news] Last year the recapture tab was $2,780,180 for horsemen at Maywood and $1,999,736 for horsemen at Balmoral. “We’ve overpaid almost $19 million (in purses) in multiple years,” Johnston said. “That’s money we loaned them interest free above and beyond the law in healthier economic times. We’re saying ‘enough is enough—we’ll give you some but not all.’” According to IHHA Executive Director Tony Somone, the horsemen paid 100% of recapture the past two years and are willing to “pay it all” again in 2014. Despite the disagreement between the two sides, Laino believes the end of the wintry weather may be a catalyst for the start of harness racing. “As soon as the weather breaks, I think there will be much more pressure on the parties internally,” the IRB executive director said. “Horses will be available and in condition. I’m hoping that will spur some motivation to get an agreement.”