KHRC approves sale of Ellis Park to Churchill

The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission on Tuesday unanimously approved the sale of Ellis Park to Churchill Downs Inc., a transaction that will give the company four tracks on the Kentucky circuit and the operating permits for two additional casinos.

Churchill announced the $79 million deal to purchase Ellis last week. Ellis, which operates 300 historical horse-racing machines, was owned by Laguna Development Corporation, an investment arm of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe in New Mexico that purchased the facility for $11 million in 2019, when it was losing money.

The perfunctory approval will allow Churchill to immediately embark on a project to build out a casino in Owensboro that had previously been approved for Ellis’s former owners. The casino, to be located in a strip mall, will have 600 historical horse-racing machines.

:: DRF Bets members get FREE DRF Past Performances - Formulator or Classic. Join now!

Churchill has said that it plans to spend $75 million on Ellis and the Owensboro casino. The company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in casinos in Kentucky over the past five years, including at Turfway Park, which Churchill bought in 2019.

Under Kentucky regulations, only racetrack permit holders are allowed to operate casinos. The regulations allow permit holders to open two casinos for each license.

The KHRC had been frustrated with Laguna’s failure to live up to its promises of investing as much as $100 million on the Ellis property when it bought the track. Laguna, which owns casinos in New Mexico, had pledged to upgrade the track and build a hotel on the property, but it later blamed pandemic-related closures of its casinos in New Mexico for creating a cash crunch that put all of its projects on the back burner.