Maryland’s Rosecroft Raceway will close July 1, laying off more than 200 employees and leaving just one harness racing track left in the state, officials announced Wednesday.
“We’re losing over $100,000 a month,” former owner Mark Vogel told The Washington Examiner. “Rosecroft has no means to generate income and stay in business.”
The 60-year-old Fort Washington track filed for bankruptcy last year because it could no longer afford to simulcast races across the U.S.
The racetrack was paying $500,000 a year to the Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association for the simulcasts. Vogel said he tried to negotiate a cheaper fee, but the association would not compromise.
“It’s a mess that I thought I could straighten out and obviously I didn’t do that,” said Vogel, who had planned to buy back the racetrack from Cloverleaf Enterprises.
Layoffs will become effective Saturday and the track doesn’t have enough money to pay employees any severance, Cloverleaf President Kelley Rogers said.
“We’ll proceed to liquidation and after that, the track will probably be bulldozed — or else it will just sit there and be an eyesore,” Rogers said.
Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. fought to sustain Rosecroft with a referendum that would have allowed voters to approve gambling with table games at Rosecroft.
“Card games would have enabled the track to stay open,” Miller said. “It passed the Senate twice this year. But the House of Delegates felt it wasn’t timely. Now the track is closing.”
House Speaker Michael E. Busch repeatedly has said he wants the state’s slow-to-move slots program up and running before the legislature tackles card games.
Either way, Vogel said card games would not have saved the track.
“We have no income — there’s no rainbow, no sunlight,” he said. “We need money now.”
Sen. C. Anthony Muse, a Democrat whose district includes Ft. Washington, said Gov. Martin O’Malley has the power to save Rosecroft.
“The rhetoric of his campaign is jobs, jobs, jobs — and now Gov. O’Malley is willing to sit back and watch 200 jobs leave our county and he will have absolutely nothing to say about it,” Muse said. “It’s a shame.”
Bob Ehrlich, O’Malley’s Republican contender, released a statement saying Rosecroft’s closure could have been avoided.
“Rosecroft’s closure is a sobering reminder of state government’s failure to design a viable gaming program in Maryland,” he said, criticizing the state’s slots program. Rosecroft was set to recieve a portion of the state’s slots revenue, but none of the five planned slots sites has opened.
Vogel said a negotiation with the Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association could enable the track to start live racing again by fall and begin hiring more employees thereafter.
Without a compromise, the 100-acre track likely will go to developers who are eyeing the land for an apartment complex, Miller said.
“It’s tragic,” said Miller, whose family built Rosecroft in the 1940s. “Two hundred permanent jobs are going to be lost along with a way of life that’s probably never going to come back.”
