Racing and Gaming Conference focuses on HISA's rollout and hurdles it faces moving forward

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority will continue to face administrative, logistical, legal, and political hurdles before it can win the trust of the racing constituencies that it is intended to regulate, officials of HISA and other racing organizations said on Wednesday at the Racing and Gaming Conference in Saratoga Springs.

The trials and tribulations of HISA were analyzed at the conference during a Wednesday morning panel that included Lisa Lazarus, who took her position as chief executive of HISA in February this year, four months prior to a limited set of the authority’s rules taking effect on July 1. While Lazarus spent her time defending HISA’s rollout, she also acknowledged some of the authority’s setbacks. Other panelists maintained that missteps made by the organization in the past year had alienated racing commissions and horsemen, complicating HISA’s ability to move forward.

Panelist John Kimmel, a former equine practitioner who has been training since 1985, said that horsemen have been frustrated by a lack of inclusion in HISA’s rule-making processes, which are overseen by seven-person committees that maintain majorities of members who do not have roles in the industry. The composition of the committees was set by HISA’s enabling legislation, under the belief that the sport would be better regulated if licensees had limited involvement in the promulgation of the rules.

“We the trainers, the people who are actually putting on the show, we don’t want to feel like we’re the whipping boys,” said Kimmel, echoing widespread comments made by horsemen over the past year. “We work hard. We work seven days a week, and we want to feel that our voices are being heard.”

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Tensions between HISA and horsemen have been omnipresent since the enabling legislation passed late in 2020, and some horsemen’s groups have fanned the flames by joining lawsuits challenging HISA’s constitutionality. Just last week, 14 state horsemen’s groups asked to join a federal suit that briefly led to HISA’s authority being suspended in Louisiana and West Virginia, suggesting that they too were seeking a rollback of HISA rules in their states.

But there are signs that HISA is attempting to mend the fences. Last Sunday, Lazarus said at The Jockey Club Round Table conference that HISA had decided to form a horsemen’s advisory committee that would consult with the authority’s management, even if it did not have a direct line to the rule-making committees. The advisory committee is expected to be formed in the next several months and be comprised of eight to 10 trainers and owners, Lazarus said in an interview after the conference.

At the Wednesday conference, Lazarus referenced the formation of the advisory committee and she seemed to acknowledge that HISA did not recognize the depth of horsemen’s dissatisfaction with the rule-making process until recently. Last year, HISA posted a batch of safety-related rules for public comment prior to submitting them to its federal overseer, the Federal Trade Commission, and the rules were eventually approved in nearly identical form to their original formulations, despite thousands of comments from horsemen in opposition.

Lazarus said on Wednesday that a new and separate batch of HISA rules that will govern medication and doping had been reformulated over the past several weeks to reflect the feedback it received during a recent public comment period. Those rules are set to go into effect on Jan. 1.

“We really tried hard this time to make sure we were listening and incorporating those things that made sense,” Lazarus said.

However, Lazarus also said that, in addition to the lawsuits, the opposition from horsemen has been frustrating to HISA due to widespread misinformation on backstretches about what HISA’s rules actually require. She cited a recent call from an exercise rider who said that HISA was putting him out of job because of a 160-pound limit for exercise riders. No such rule exists.

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“Obviously there’s a lot of rumor and we have to work with that to build trust,” Lazarus said.

Opposition from horsemen’s groups has not been universal, and Alan Foreman, the chief executive officer of a mid-Atlantic-based coalition of horsemen that has remained solidly behind HISA – at least as a matter of policy – was the moderator of Wednesday’s panel. In his opening remarks, he acknowledged that the rollout of HISA “has not been perfect,” but he stressed that his group believes that HISA “is the law” while representing “the largest and most significant change in our business, probably in our history.”

Foreman also spent some of his time detailing the many efforts on behalf of the industry to harmonize the rules of all 38 U.S. racing jurisdictions over the past two decades, efforts that proved futile. HISA is designed to eventually accomplish that goal, even if its rollout has been patchy and complicated by back and forth legal rulings that has left it in limbo in some states.

“We’re still wrestling with how to get there,” Foreman said, with some exasperation.

Ed Martin, the chief executive officer of the Association of Racing Commissioners International, said that HISA’s outreach to racing commissions had improved since Lazarus took the reins in February. However, he also contended that HISA had effectively sidelined racing commissions throughout its early days, despite his members’ willingness to help. That experience, Martin said, had left racing commissions with a bitter taste in their mouths.

Saying that racing commissions had knowledge of the rule-making process and expertise in gaining consensus, Martin used an analogy about going for a hike in the local mountains all alone. “Your hike might be a little easier if you took a guide with you,” Martin said.

The four lawsuits that have been filed in opposition to HISA remain a particular source of contention. At Sunday’s Round Table conference, Lazarus had said that HISA has had to spend $1.8 million of its $14 million budget on legal fees to deal with the suits, and officials of The Jockey Club – which played a role in writing the legislation creating HISA – had described the suits as a “distraction and a waste of industry resources.”

Martin struck back at that characterization on Wednesday, saying that the commissions that had initiated the suits did so “because they feel there are legitimate issues that need to be addressed.” He then urged HISA to seek a settlement in the matters and intimated that HISA and its attorneys have refused to engage with the parties to the suits.

That led Lazarus to interrupt him.

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“I talk to everyone who is suing us,” she said. “In fact I spend a lot of my day talking to people who are suing us.”

The first two lawsuits challenging HISA’s enabling legislation on constitutional grounds were both dismissed earlier this year, in U.S. District Courts in Texas and Kentucky. The plaintiffs, which include the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association and racing commissions in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, have appealed both decisions. Elsewhere, two others suits in opposition to HISA, one filed in Texas and the other in Louisiana, also continue to play out, without a clear resolution in sight.

“We’ll probably be talking about litigation at this time next year,” Foreman said.

Martin said that he was disappointed that the industry had not been able to rally behind HISA, but he characterized the legal challenges as necessary.

“We view HISA as a given,” he said. “We want it to work. We don’t want it to be a mess. People have legitimate legal questions, including some people who are filing lawsuits, because they want whatever that is being done to be done right.”