Baltimore Acting Mayor Jack Young and several other local officials said that they "view the Maryland Jockey Club's closure of nearly 7,000 seats at Pimlico Race Course as retribution for losing a legislative fight with the city about how to spend state subsidies on horse racing tracks," according to a front-page piece by Doug Donovan of the BALTIMORE SUN. City officials are "demanding evidence of the safety problems that prompted the closure" and are "sending building inspectors to assess what impact the jockey club's decision might have on other seating areas." The decision to close the seats came days after Maryland lawmakers ended the '19 legislative session "without passing a company-backed bill to invest state funds at Laurel Park instead of Pimlico." Officials from The Stronach Group, which owns the jockey club, said that the decision was "based on an engineering firm's findings they received in late March that 6,670 seats in the Old Grandstand's open-air section are 'no longer suitable to sustain that level of load bearing weight.'" Several local officials said that they "want the company to release the engineering report and question why it did not notify state lawmakers about the findings" before the session ended April 8. The Stronach Group CEO & President of U.S. Real Estate Bill Hecht said that the legislative session "had nothing to do with the closure." Hecht: "This decision should in no way be interpreted as anything other than ensuring the safety of our guests and employees." Maryland Racing Commission Exec Dir Mike Hopkins said his agency "was not aware of any prior structural issues" at Pimlico (BALTIMORE SUN, 4/16).
