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Off-Track Betting parlors, dingy backdrops for decades of triumph and heartbreak, could become a thing of the past in the city by next June, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday, as officials at the financially precarious operation began devising a plan for its shutdown.
The operation, established in 1970 to generate public revenue and diminish the influence of organized crime on gambling, is technically profitable, making roughly $125 million on about $1 billion in bets a year. But, Bloomberg officials say, because of requirements that it turn over an increasing portion of its revenues to the state, it has been running at a loss, dipping into cash reserves to cover the shortfall.
With those reserves set to run out next June, the business cannot go on without an infusion of cash, officials say, which the city is unwilling to provide.
“We are not going to subsidize it,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters after an award ceremony on Staten Island. “This city has too many other things to do with its money.”
In response, David Cornstein, chairman of the city’s OTB board, asked Raymond Casey, the president of the gambling operation, to draft a plan for ending betting and closing down the more than 60 OTB branches.
The fate of OTB, whose payments to the state go in large part to support the beleaguered racing industry, is also bound to racing’s future. The thoroughbred horse racing franchise is set to expire at the end of the year, and unless Gov. Eliot Spitzer and state lawmakers can reach a compromise on who should run the tracks going forward, the racetracks at Belmont, Aqueduct and Saratoga Springs could shut down.
Mr. Bloomberg said he had briefed the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, on his willingness to let the gambling business close. Both men indicated through spokesmen that they would weigh the options, along with the larger issues facing the racing industry.
Evan Stavisky, a spokesman for the union representing the 1,500 city OTB workers, cautioned that allowing the gambling operation to fail in the city, where more bets were placed than at any other site in the state, would jeopardize the industry overall.
Paul Larrabee, a spokesman for Mr. Spitzer, declined to comment specifically yesterday on the possible shutdown of the city’s OTB corporation, one of several around the state that broadcast races from thoroughbred racetracks. But he noted that the state received $15 million a year in revenue from city OTB parlors, revenue that he said depended on the tracks’ continuing to operate.
Whether Albany can reach an agreement remains to be seen. But at OTB parlors in Harlem and Midtown Manhattan, reaction to the potential closings ranged from disbelief to relief.
“I don’t think they’ll close — they always take their cut,” said Jose Martinez, 58, amid shouts of “Pick six-in-one,” and “Get me Laurel!” at a parlor on West 125th Street. “I don’t think it’s possible they could close. Just because they say they’re losing money doesn’t make it true.”
At the same parlor, where the floor was strewn with tickets and about 50 men crowded around the betting booths, looked up at television screens lining the walls or studied the day’s races, William Frazer, 70, said he came from Corona, Queens, to hang out with his friends.
“You see these people making noise?” he said. “People love the game. This is a good convenience for the people. The track is good, but it’s too far out.”
And at a branch on Seventh Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets, Thomas Jones, 58, said he did not care if the parlors closed down.
“I would save more money,” he said. “It becomes a sport, and a very chronic sport.” Then, sounding a bit like Mr. Bloomberg, who has expressed discomfort with the government’s involvement in gambling, Mr. Jones added: “I think OTB should be privatized. The city should have nothing to do with gambling.”
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