AURORA | If voters say yes to Amendment 68 tonight, they can expect a massive expansion at the Arapahoe Park horse racing track.
Year-round table games and slot machines will join horse racing there to make the facility one of the state’s top gambling destinations. And projections call for more than $100 million in annual tax revenue to be funneled to Colorado schools.
But if voters say no? The future for the 400-acre, 10,000-seat horse-racing track just outside the Aurora city limits is murkier.
Across the country, horse racing’s popularity has waned in recent years. And in Colorado — where all of the state’s dog tracks have closed, leaving Arapahoe Park as the only place to wager on live, in-person racing — the same has been true.
From early on in the campaign, officials at the track have said expanding the gaming options there and making Arapahoe Park a year-round destination was an important piece of the track’s future.
Becky Brooks, a spokeswoman for Mile High Racing, which manages Arapahoe Park and 11 off-track betting facilities around the state, said Tuesday that no matter what happens when the polls close, horses will run at the track next summer and into the future.
“We are still committed to continuing to racing at Arapahoe Park,” she said.
Across the country, horse racing has seen its popularity dip in recent years. According to the Jockey Club, a New York-based company that tracks horse racing statistics, the number of races around the country have fallen from more than 74,000 in 1989 to just 43,000 last year. The same trend has held true in Colorado, where there were more than 600 races in 1993, and just 250 in 2013.
Brooks said that at Arapahoe Park, attendance was actually up last year. State law allows races at the park just 39 days of the year and the park is open only in the summer.
Brooks said the focus in recent months has been exclusively on the campaign, so officials haven’t discussed other possible expansion plans for Arapahoe Park if Amendment 68 fails.
“Those conversations have not been had because we have been so focused on the campaign,” she said.
Arapahoe County Commissioner Rod Bockenfeld, whose district includes the race track, said county planning rules give the track plenty of options for expansion, including retail, restaurants and other non-gaming entertainment.
Bockenfeld, who has remained neutral on Amendment 68, said there will always be an emotional constituency that wants to see horse racing survive at the track, especially considering that the track is the last of its kind in Colorado.
Aurora City Councilman Bob Broom said that if the measure fails, he wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar ballot question again in a few years. That’s because gaming is what makes the property stand out from other area amenities like the nearby Southlands Mall.
“Without that magnet to pull people out there, that’s really a poor location to build commercial at this point in time,” he said.