The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority has filed a complaint to its board alleging that Churchill Downs has failed to pay $2.4 million to the authority for services provided in 2025, according to a notice posted to HISA’s website on Wednesday. The complaint, which seeks a hearing in front of a panel of three HISA board members on March 11, is the latest development in a legal dispute over HISA’s fees that began in earnest in late 2024 when Churchill’s parent company, Churchill Downs Inc., and the New York Racing Association jointly filed a lawsuit contending that HISA violated a provision of its enabling legislation by adopting a fee structure that required tracks with larger purses to pay a larger proportion of HISA’s dues than tracks with smaller purses. In four separate complaints, HISA says that it issued monthly bills throughout 2025 to Churchill Downs and three of the other tracks owned by CDI under a revised formula that was weighted solely on the number of starts, which is the formula the lawsuit was seeking. According to the complaint, CDI did not respond to any of the invoices. A CDI spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The complaint says that CDI can file a response to the board by March 6. CDI operates four racetracks that fall under HISA’s jurisdiction: Churchill Downs in Louisville, Turfway Park in Northern Kentucky, Ellis Park in Western Kentucky, and Presque Isle Downs in western Pennsylvania. In total, including the $2.4 million in arrears from Churchill Downs, HISA says that CDI’s tracks owe the authority approximately $5.0 million in 2025 dues. :: KENTUCKY DERBY 2026: Top contenders, point standings, prep schedule, news, and more The complaint is seeking full remittance of the dues invoiced to the company in 2025 plus interest. If the board rules in its favor and CDI does not pay the judgement, HISA said in the complaint, it would invoke a power contained in its enabling legislation that allows the authority to block the sale of CDI’s simulcast signals to out-of-state tracks. “The CDI racetracks stand alone among covered racetracks in refusing to make any HISA assessment payments whatsoever for 2025,” HISA said in the complaint. “Yet the CDI racetracks continue to receive millions of dollars in services from the Authority.” Churchill has not yet reported its full-year 2025 results. For the first nine months of 2025, the company had net income of $331.7 million, according to its financial statements, on total revenue of $2.26 billion. Those figures represent all of the company’s businesses, including non-racing operations. NYRA reached a settlement with HISA over the lawsuit in early 2025 and dropped out of the litigation. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, which is based in Louisville.  When the suit was filed, HISA was contemplating a revision to its formula that would restrict the dues calculation to a racetrack’s number of starts. The organization eventually filed a formal revision to the FTC, which approved the new rule, effective Jan. 1, 2026. According to the complaint, the invoiced amounts for 2025 were calculated using the revised formula, in an acknowledgement that CDI’s federal lawsuit is still pending. Under the prior formula, the complaint says, CDI would have owed $6.33 million in fees for its four tracks for 2025. “CDI owes at least the amount sought here regardless of the outcome of the pending litigation,” the HISA complaint says. HISA’s funding mechanism has been a source of friction among other racing constituencies, including several horsemen’s groups, ever since the authority began operating midway through 2022. Two Iowa horsemen filed a lawsuit in 2024 challenging the funding mechanism, but that suit was argued on the grounds that HISA’s enabling legislation could not delegate the power to levy fees to a private company. HISA adopted the earlier formula for fees as a way to mollify tracks and horsemen in states that run a large number of races but do not distribute massive amounts of purses. Under the split formula, those states would pay a lower fee per start than tracks on first-tier circuits, such as in New York and Kentucky. According to the complaint, the three HISA board members who will conduct the hearing include Joe DeFrancis, who formerly owned and operated Laurel Park and Pimlico Racecourse in Maryland; Bill Thomason, a former chief executive of Keeneland Association; and Terri Mazur, a trial lawyer who specializes in securities and financial services law. :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.