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Editorial: Dixon's horse race
Track proponents made key mistakes
Thursday, April 19, 2007

In the end, it doesn't matter in a horse race if the winner bested the field by many lengths or by a nose. In Solano County, the proposed horse track known as Dixon Downs lost Tuesday night. Had a few hundred residents changed their minds, or had a few hundred more proponents showed up at the polls, Dixon Downs would have passed.

After spending millions to buy the land and to produce the environmental documents (not to mention mount the half-million-dollar campaign), Dixon Downs advocates must be agonizing over having come relatively close.

In politics, losing by a little raises the temptation to try again. With Dixon Downs, that course is best left for considerable reflection. Prospects for another attempt for Dixon Downs appear slim.

As a page that has long opposed an expansion of all kinds of gambling, from the school lottery to Indian casinos, Dixon Downs didn't win our support. We see gambling as an enterprise that sucks life and money out of society rather than creating sustainable, economic value. And partly our opposition was because Dixon Downs simply blew it. Now that it has lost, those mistakes loom large.

Any time a controversial enterprise wants to come to a small town and dominate the scene, the proponents need to quickly make as many friends as possible and leave the clear impression that they respect the desires of the community. Dixon Downs promoters didn't do that. They played hardball for months with the nearby Campbells tomato paste operation, which worried about how all of its trucks and all those gamblers would co-exist on the roads. And they played coy about whether in a few years the racetrack would try to expand gambling to include slot machines (that was to be left to another, potential election). They overreached. And by the time they retreated, making changes to appease the cannery and curtail any expansion of gambling, it was too late.

If Dixon were some Podunk pit stop in Nevada, none of those mistakes would have mattered. But Dixon isn't one of those communities with a culture of desperation. This may not have been immediately evident to Magna Entertainment, the horse-track backers out of Canada. But someone here should have told them.