Illinois Racing Board to begin rule-making process for historical racing machines

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – The Illinois Racing Board at a regular monthly meeting Thursday at Arlington said it would begin the formal process of making rules to govern the introduction of historical racing machines to Hawthorne Race Course and Fairmount Park.

The IRB will move forward with the rule-making process at the recommendation of a board committee formed at the IRB’s June meeting and tasked with investigating the legality of historical racing. The committee, fitting the prospect of historical racing within the context of the Illinois Horse Racing Act, concluded that “historical horse racing may be lawfully conducted by organization licensees pursuant to their organization licenses.”

Arlington, the third racetrack still operating in Illinois, has so far expressed no desire to implement historical horse racing and is acting as a neutral party as Hawthorne and Fairmount push forward with the plan.

Illinois is using Kentucky, which has historical horse racing at several venues, as a template for creating a regulatory framework. Kentucky has no casinos, however, while there are 10 casinos in Illinois.

The committee report stressed that it was only advising the IRB to engage in making rules that can be presented to the board for review. “Today, we are not authorizing the actual conducting of such wagering,” a section of the report’s conclusion said. Rules would have to be approved by the IRB, the office of the Illinois governor, and the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR).

Historical racing machines take bets on past races (in this case, races that were run in Illinois) that the bettor can handicap to some degree using data, but some people contend the machines are little different from slots. As such, their introduction could face opposition from other Illinois gambling interests.

Illinois’s three racetracks would prefer to be permitted to conduct casino gambling rather than historical racing, and the committee’s report expressed hope that a general gambling expansion bill that would authorize casino gambling at tracks would be enacted before the historical-racing process even came close to reaching fruition.