U.S. Trotting Association President Russell C. Williams submitted the following letter to the editor to the Paulick Report this week. Williams wanted to share his thoughts on a letter we published Oct. 16 from USTA director David Siegel. Siegel urged the Standardbred industry to “extend an olive branch” to supporters of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020 with the hope of active participation in any forthcoming federal racing authority.
My friend David Siegel urges the Standardbred industry to be practical and sit down with the federal bill's key supporters to influence its direction regarding Standardbred racing. This is one of several calls for us to come to the table. All of them suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of how laws work.
Passing a law is completely different from, say, issuing an invitation to discuss a plan to strengthen integrity, something that never happened in this case. If the bill passes, it will become a federal statute. “Place at the table” platitudes like David's ignore that with a statute you can get what is provided in the statute, and you cannot get what is not provided. For a negotiation to have any meaning at this point, it would have to be possible for the bill's language to change before it becomes a statute. Our experience over more than three years demonstrates that this is impossible.
The same goes for all the other ways in which the bill is unacceptable. Since we were first inserted into the bill without our knowledge or consent, the Standardbred industry has repeatedly explained our objections to it, every one of which would require changes to its language. The key supporters have consistently set their faces against even a single change. Thus, a one-sided negotiation has already been going on for more than three years, during which our concerns have been completely disregarded.
The United States Trotting Association is not alone in objecting to the language of the bill. The National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association represents 29,000 Thoroughbred people who are not in racing for the silver cups. Like most USTA members, most of them make their living in racing and, like us, they object to the language of the bill. The American Quarter Horse Association has 221,000 members, and they also object to the language of the bill. None of us is interested in an opportunity to sit down now, at the Children's Table.
The time for harness racing to have been offered a place at a table was before we got shoehorned into a done deal of someone else's making. That would have been a good faith moment in which to discuss a legislative approach that would credibly allow for the profound differences in the breeds, account for the still-unknown costs that a new federal regulatory tier will rain down on us if we tolerate this legislation, and preserve to us the decisive voice in our own destiny that we deserve to keep.
Fortunately, we have other, eminently practical ways to prevent the federal bill's key supporters – no, let us call them what they are: its elite supporters — from imposing their notion of a future on us.
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