Can we save the Northern Kentucky horse park?
Going to the track in Northern Kentucky is a time-honored tradition in my family. Harrumph if you must, but my parents started taking me along to the local Kentucky horse park when I was a teenager.
And in the very recent past, it wasn't unusual for employers and vendors in the tri-state area to offer Northern Kentucky race track junkets for employees and clients. These days, I don’t know of anyone doing this, unless it’s a once-a-year trek to the Kentucky Derby.
With the advent of the Indiana riverboat casinos and the raging arguments against horse racing from PETA, are we losing sight of the honorable Kentucky race track tradition?
- According to the Indianapolis Star, Kentucky residents spend more than $600 million a year at the Indiana riverboat casinos. Yet Ohio and Kentucky have rejected the addition of slot machines into the race tracks.
- The Kentucky Horse Racing Authority claims that Kentucky horse park attendance is on a huge upswing. The actual bump was an additional 80,000 visitors to the Kentucky race tracks in 2005 from the year before. The Northern Kentucky race track, Turfway Park, was down and has an annual attendance of less than 200,000.
No surprise, because in recent years when I've attended live racing at Turfway Park, the stands have been empty. Turfway Park quit reporting on their biggest event, the spring Lane's End stakes several years ago. Back then the stakes’ attendance hovered around 22,000, or about 10% of their total annual attendance.
KEEP, the Kentucky Equine Education Project, claims the Kentucky horse park has a $4 billion economic impact and provide 100,000 direct and indirect jobs. KEEP's mission is to educate and inform Kentuckians about the economic benefits of the Kentucky race track while promoting new opportunities for jobs and economic growth.
Programs like KEEP give me hope that Turfway Park will manage to stay open. Turfway could also benefit from some corporate partnerships, encouraging local companies to use them for parties and banquets. Some effective viral marketing and PR wouldn’t hurt Turfway Park, either. There’s next to no press at all preceding their biggest events.
I don’t know if the Kentucky race tracks will make it to the next generation. I would hate to see the end of Kentucky horse racing. Whether in a suite at Churchill Downs’ Jockey Club or sprawled out in the stands at Turfway, it’s always fun. And it’s something I would miss terribly.
Things to do today in Northern Kentucky:
- Visit the Kentucky Equine Education Project site and support your local Kentucky horse park by becoming a KEEP member for $10 a year.
- Go to the used book sale at the Newport library.
- Get ready for summer by checking out the RV and Camper Expo at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center.
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