THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 14, 1994 TAG: 9410130219
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
And they're off - to New Kent County.
Virginia Beach didn't win the race for the state's one horse track. It didn't even show. But look what it was up against. The track proposed by Colonial Downs will be more centrally located in the state, on a site which came free from a local corporation, has little traffic to add to, fewer neighbors to disrupt, and is closer both to more population centers and more horsey country. Most of those people and horses won't have to negotiate a bridge-tunnel to get to this track, (If it's not one water problem around here, it's another.) Colonial Downs offered more racing days, more solid financing, less government investment, less overall cost and, last and least, less aircraft noise.
A committee of political appointees is arguably no way to select the state's single site for a horse track, especially when South Hampton Roads isn't represented on it. With one apparent exception from Northern Virginia, however, these committee members seem to have voted on relative merit as much as anything else.
But here's what Virginia Beach still has to work with: other directions in which to go and grow, plus the just-demonstrated ability to pull together once the city agrees on what and where. New Kent, it's been said, wants day-trippers: visit the race track, play 18 holes, go home. If home is more than a couple of hours away, though, the ocean is closer: Virginia Beach, with 11,000 hotel rooms and a host of tourist attractions to make several days and nights of.
The Beach can get more tourist attractions - golf courses, amphitheater, riverboat casino, hotel/convention center, all of which would produce revenue for private and public coffers, and none of which fear NAS Oceana. Nevermind that Churchill Downs, this city's track sponsor, considered jet noise no bar to a track. Oceana couldn't scare horses as much as closing Oceana scares residents. (Closing Fort Story, on the other hand, could present an opportunity . . . )
The big loser here from the commission's decision is Virginia Beach agriculture. Princess Anne Downs' demand for horses, grains and related services, might have long staved off a fundamental question too seldom asked: Is farming really viable here without some new industry to help sustain, even boost it? And since a local race track won't do it, what will?
KEYWORDS: RACE TRACK HORSE RACING by CNB