LEXINGTON, Ky. – The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission on Tuesday approved a pending deal that will allow the group that owns a minority stake in Ellis Park to buy the majority stake held by Ron Geary, the public face of Ellis’s ownership since he bought the track outright in 2006. Saratoga Casino and Hospitality Group has reached a deal to purchase Geary’s entire 70 percent stake, according to the commission and an attorney representing the Saratoga group, which owns and operates a harness track and casino in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The deal needed to be approved by the commission before it closed in order for the track to maintain its operating license, commission personnel said. Saratoga Casino and Hospitality Group had previously bought a 30 percent share in the track in 2012, with options to purchase an additional 20 percent of the parent company’s stock or buy all of the stock outright. However, those options had expired, according to Emily Cowles, the attorney representing SCHG in the acquisition. Cowles declined to provide a value for the stock that SCHG acquired in the deal. She said she expected the deal to close in a matter of days. Cowles said that the new owners do not plan to make any immediate management changes at the track, which is in the midst of its live racing season.  “This is for the benefit of the racetrack,” Cowles said. “There will be a seamless transition. We’re expected to start the process as soon as possible. The meet will run as usual.” The sale occurred after several weeks of negotiation, according to Cowles. Over those past few weeks, rumors had swirled on the Ellis Park backstretch and among other Kentucky horsemen about the future of the track.  In a statement distributed after the meeting, Geary said that he decided to sell his stake in order to spend more time with his family. “It’s been 12 years, and I just turned 71,” Geary said. “My wife and my two kids and my nine grandkids for years have asked me to slow down. I think it’s time.” Marty Maline, the longtime executive director of the Kentucky Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, said after the meeting that the Kentucky HBPA supported the deal. “We’re pretty comfortable with [the Saratoga group],” he said. “They are familiar with Ellis Park, and we think they will continue to move us forward.”  Maline said that Ellis’s purses have become “respectable” over the past several years due to infusions of purse money from Kentucky Downs, the small track on the border with Tennessee that distributed $3 million from its own purse funds to Ellis Park in 2016 and 2017. This year, Kentucky Downs distributed $500,000 each in purse funds to Ellis, Keeneland in Lexington, and Churchill Downs in Louisville. “We’re excited for the future, and we think they are going to do a good job,” Maline said.  Geary, a former president of a company that provided health-care services for the elderly, purchased the track in 2006 from Churchill Downs. The track struggled financially for several years after the purchase, but its fortunes appeared to have taken a turn for the better several years after Ellis installed historical horseracing machines, devices that are similar to slot machines, in 2012. Betting through the machines through May of the fiscal year, which ends in June, has been $74.7 million, according to records maintained by the KHRC, up 8.3 percent over the same period last year. Ellis’s net commission on the betting has been $4.84 million, up 10.9 percent, according to the records.  All-sources handle on Ellis Park’s races this year is up 16 percent, according to the KHRC records, while average daily handle is up 12.3 percent, to $1.3 million.