I headed out to Belmont early on Saturday morning, to visit the children at Anna House before watching workouts and visiting the backstretch.  As always, Belmont felt like a little city:  at Anna House, a half dozen or more teachers worked with children of varying ages as they played, learned, read, built, created; at the track, tram drivers carted around groups of visitors and tourists; on the backstretch, grooms and hotwalkers bathed, walked, and fed their equine charges.  As always, I was in awe of the range of tasks and talents that keep a racetrack running smoothly.

And I couldn’t help imagining what it might all look like if racing shuts down, even temporarily, in less than a month.  I kept envisioning things disappearing, like they do in cartoons, in a bubble that makes that sort of popping sound as things go away.

Pop!  There goes Anna House, and with it the child care on which backstretch workers depend. They won’t work on the backstretch any more, but they’ll need to work somewhere, even if only for a short time, and those workplaces won’t offer the same level of child care that Anna House does.

Pop!  There go concession stands.  I thought of the young woman with whom I spoke Saturday morning, who works in the grandstand on the weekends and attends college to earn her degree in education during the week.  What effect might unemployment, even if only for a few weeks, have on those plans?

Pop!  There go hundreds and hundreds of horses on the backstretch at Belmont and Aqueduct—without racing, where do they go?

Pop!  There go carpentry jobs, maintenance jobs, horse transport jobs, horse feed jobs, training jobs, not just on the Belmont backstretch, but across New York State.

I get that a lot of factors have combined to get New York racing to this point; I get that racing in the state might need to be re-envisioned; I get that racing, here and everywhere, needs to try to be self-sufficient instead of relying on money outside the sport.

But I don’t get, and I don’t accept, that once again, people at the bottom of the rung of the employment ladder are at the mercy of the folks in Albany who don’t face losing their jobs, or, more gallingly, at the mercy of the folks  at NYC-OTB who would like to profit off the work of others without paying them for it.

The inaction, lack of interest, and dearth of courage and compassion on the part of our elected officials are now, as they were several years ago during the franchise negotiations, inexcusable.  People in the state will be put out of work because they can’t keep their promises, because they can’t make a decision that should have been made nearly a decade ago, because they can’t provide the money, decisions, or leadership that New York racing deserves?

More than two years ago, when New York racing faced a similar shutdown as resolution of the franchise agreement dragged on, with similarly deplorable inaction by the elected representatives of New York’s citizens, I believed that common sense, compassion, and obligation would stop those representatives from bringing racing to a halt.  This time, I am not nearly so sanguine.

More than two years ago, I wrote, “I don’t believe that anyone involved could look at himself in the mirror after putting thousands of people out of a job, and out of a home.”  I was pretty confident then, and I was right.

But this time, I have no such faith in the power of conscience and of what’s right to rule the day.  I hope I’m wrong.