Today at Montana OTB

For the first time since the races went dark in 2007, commissioners sat face-to-face Thursday with someone who has a concrete plan to bring them back.

When it was over, Eric Spector of Oneida Capital and county officials alike were encouraged that there'll be racing next August at the Western Montana Fair.

"I'm excited," said fair manager Scot Meader. "I think we'll get it done."

The devil will be in the details, and those have to be ironed out quickly. The Montana Board of Horse Racing, represented at Thursday's meeting by Ray Tracy of Stevensville, will meet Jan. 7 to approve racing dates for 2010.

What's more, commissioner Jean Curtiss pointed out, "if we aren't able to negotiate something by the middle of January, we need to find other activities to happen at the fairgrounds."

"We're geared for that," Spector assured.

He'll send the county a detailed proposal on Monday, then work with chief administrative officer Dale Bickell and Meader to refine it.

The fair is a community-based event, Meader pointed out.

"I'm going to be negotiating for what's best for our community," he said.

That includes continuing the tradition of nonprofit-operated food booths and parking, which can be a service group's biggest fundraiser. That can be worked out, said Spector, though at other tracks the company controls those things.

Spector referred the commissioners - Curtiss, chairman Bill Carey and Michele Landquist - to other counties with whom his companies recently contracted to lease their tracks for racing.

As Montana Entertainment, Oneida ran this summer's meet in Great Falls and also all simulcast racing in the state this year. As Idaho Entertainment, it signed a five-year agreement in July to run live and simulcast racing year-round at LesBoisPark in Boise. For the past three years, Oneida has also owned and operated Wyoming Downs near Evanston, that state's only pari-mutuel racetrack.

Spector said the first lease at Great Falls was for the 2009 races only.

"It entitled us to renegotiate with the county and they, as we speak, have a revised lease agreement in front of them which is a one-year lease with one-year extensions," he said.

One reason for a longer-term contract, he added, is to provide for capital improvements that Oneida would undertake.

"The ability on our end to amortize those investments is not generally done in a one-year period of time," he said.

Spector said it worked well at Great Falls to have racing on the weekend before the Montana State Fair began and on the first two days of the fair itself. He suggested a similar scenario in Missoula, which has traditionally run races each day of the six-day meet.

However, past experimentations with non-fair race dates have been generally unsuccessful, Meader said.

"I think we would prefer, if we brought racing back, to have it at the fair," Bickell said.

"We're not wed to any one way of doing it," Spector assured. "We're flexible and what we're begging for in the discussion is a good give and take that tells us what are the concerns and the issues."

Spector opened his presentation by citing reasons why his company, based in Carlsbad, Calif., is interested in bringing racing back to Missoula. It's one of Montana's largest cities and counties, a major media market in the state, and could be a "jumping-off point for racing in the region."

As the sole simulcast provider in Montana, Oneida has a memorandum of understanding with the state board of racing to expand live racing and revive the past circuit that existed. That circuit included weeklong fair-time racing at Kalispell, Missoula and Hamilton.

"We've had some very basic discussions with a number of resources up in Kalispell," he said.

Dale Mahlum, a Missoula horseman and former state senator who served on Gov. Brian Schweitzer's horse racing task force in 2007 , helped bring Spector and the Missoula commissioners together.

"Both parties want to find common ground to see if there'll be a need for future meetings to forge ahead with this endeavor," Mahlum said.

"We're prepared to continue to proceed if you're willing," said Spector, who'll appear Friday at a special hearing in Helena to make a case for his company to get an extension to its contract to oversee Montana simulcast racing. A Billings group has submitted a competing bid.

Carey thanked Spector for the visit.

"We look forward to having something to review and consider," the commission chairman said.

She doesn't knows how discussions will shake out, Landquist said. "But I have a funny feeling that once you start discussing this, it might happen."