Coffee Tycoon to Axe 226 Workers from Oregon Racetrack if Gaming Machines Are No-Go

An OR racetrack owned by Dutch Bros java billionaire Travis Boersma testament put down sour 226 workers next month. That’s unless the say racing commissioning greenlights its diligence for 225 historical horse-racing machines.

The ultimatum, world-class reported past Willamette Week, comes as an alignment of ix Oregon tribal operators continues to pressurize the legislative assembly to place play expanding upon on hold. These include the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, which operates the Seven Feathers Casino Resort, 40 miles due north of Grants Pass.

The tribes are calling a comprehensive limited review of the state’s gaming landscape, noting it has been a quarter-century since the utmost one.

They have exclusivity on slots and cassino gaming below the terms of their compacts with the state. But they sense this right on is being threatened past the growing of historical horse-racing machines, as well as mobile betting, which has been available via the OR Lottery since 2019.

A measure that would have got constituted a task thrust to examine the future of gaming in the land stalled in the law-makers lastly year.

Flying Lark on Hold

Following the demise of Portland Meadows in 2019, Grants Pass is now the only commercial message racecourse left inward Oregon.

Boersma is itching to undecided the Flying Lark, a dining, drinking, and gaming ecesis conterminous to the rail that he claims testament metamorphose Grants Pass into an “epicenter of world-wide racing.”

But first, he needs those gambling machines.

In a note to commonwealth authorities seen by Willamette Week, the rails said it had expected a conclusion from the racing charge last-place month. But it latterly learned it foremost needs sign-off from the OR Department of Justice, which is holding upwardly the process.

We’ve stippled every ‘i,’ we’ve crossed every ‘t’ — we’ve had legion(p) conversations with tribe, with say and political figures, soup-to-nuts, top-to-bottom o'er the course of the cobbler's last leash years and there has not in one case been the mention, the thought that we would non be able to unresolved our doors,” Boersma told local ABC affiliate KDRV.

“I had a conversation with [employees] last week and i had to permit them live what do and burden are here, and it’s ruinous for people and their lives,” he added.

Tech Outpacing Regulation

Historical Equus caballus racing machines take into account players to bet on replays of past times races with the identities of the races obscured. They feature been effectual in Oregon since 2012, but only when at racetracks. That’s because they broadly expend the pari-mutuel betting scheme permitted at racetracks.

The tribes difference this. In a varsity letter last Oct to the state’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, they complained the newest generation of machines had “evolved beyond the pari-mutuel system of rules to the pointedness where they are “nothing other than slot machines, from a player perspective.”

“The state’s regulatory fabric has non evolved to reverberate young technology or its impacts on the public,” the tribes wrote. “We are at a critical instant where the body politic is well-nigh to approve the largest expanding upon of state-regulated play inwards decades without public or legislative input.”