Ninety stablehands and related workers who get free room and board at Pimlico Race Course will be uprooted and moved to horse racing tracks in Laurel and Bowie.

Canada-based Magna Entertainment Corp., which owns the Pimlico, Bowie and Laurel tracks, is stopping its training and stabling operations at Pimlico and consolidating those operations at the larger Laurel and
Bowie tracks to save an estimated $180,000 a month, according to the Maryland Jockey Club, which runs the day-to-day operations for Magna at the three tracks.

Racing secretary Georgeanne Hale will work with horse trainers to relocate workers at the club’s expense by Aug. 31, club officials said.

But the upheaval will be hard on the stablehands, hotwalkers and grooms — many of them poor and without cars — who live and work in dormitories at Pimlico, said Bobby Lillis, a benefits coordinator for the Maryland Horsemen’s Assistance Fund who acts as a liaison and advocate for the stablehands.

“It’s very upsetting to all of them. It’s very confusing,” Lillis said. He predicted that not all of them will make the move, and that some will end up working on the horse farms of the trainers who hired them. Those who live outside the track will have to commute and pay the spiraling cost of gas, or find rental housing in Laurel or Bowie, Lillis said.

Those who are relocated for free might have to move into tack rooms with strangers, Lillis said. He said moving wouldn’t have been so difficult 20 years ago, but stablehands in recent years have become accustomed to working and living at one track year-round.

Hotwalker Trish Rugieri was panicky at Pimlico after being told last week that she and her boyfriend, groom John Collins, would have to move by Aug. 31 from the room they have called home for five years. Before she moved to Pimlico, she was homeless.

“They’re just pushing us out,” said Rugieri, 43. “We’ll be out on the street.”

She said she feared that she and Collins will be forced to “double up” with workers in small rooms at Laurel or Bowie.

“What am I going to do with all my stuff?” she asked.

“Obviously, it’s an inconvenience,” said Mike Gathagan, a spokesman for the Maryland Jockey Club. But he said ending stabling and training was “simple economics,” because Pimlico doesn’t bring in enough money to keep the workers at the track, which has about 600 stalls, compared with about 750 at Bowie and nearly 1,000 at Laurel.

Lillis said the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association has subsidized stabling and training at Pimlico in the past but can’t afford to do it anymore.

“We’re cutting purses and stakes races, except for the Maryland Million in October,” Lillis said.

In another cost-cutting measure, the Jockey Club and horsemen’s association agreed to suspend the $300,000 Grade I Frank J. De Francis Dash at Laurel Park, one of three Grade I races in Maryland, along with the Preakness Stakes and Pimlico Special.

The cuts raise the stakes in the fight over an upcoming voter referendum on whether to legalize slot machine gambling at four tracks in Maryland (Pimlico not one of them). Many in the horse racing industry have expressed fear that Magna, which would get a share of slots revenue, might otherwise close Pimlico and move the Preakness Stakes out of state.

“It all boils down to slots,” Gathagan said. “It’s a major deal for us to have to shut down a training and stabling center,” as well as slash the racing schedule. “It’s getting toward rock bottom. This has to tell you we’re not crying wolf.”

Stablehands, too, told the Messenger in 2005 they considered slots as their potential salvation. Efforts to legalize slots have languished in the General Assembly. But Lillis says slots are still the industry’s best hope.

“Our whole livelihood depends on a November referendum,” he said.

The Maryland Racing Commission meets Aug. 19 in the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium.
“I’m sure this will be a hot topic,” Lillis said.

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