Legal action possible against decision

Press, 17 November 1981, Page 30

Legal action possible against decision

.. The Banks Peninsula Trotting Club is considering taking legal action in an attempt to reverse a decision made at a meeting of the combined committee of the Racing and Trotting Conference and the Greyhound Racing Association held in Christchurch last Thursday.

. The committee allowed an objection from the Timaru Racing Club against the Banks Peninsula Racing Club holding a meeting on December 28, the same day as a galloping meeting is’ to be run at Washdyke. , . The Banks Peninsula club will now race on Tuesday, December 29, which is not a public holiday. “The dates were approved by the two conferences and the Minister of Internal Affairs back in July and it has taken until November, or about, seven weeks from our meeting that an objection is heard,” said the president of the club (Mr George Mugford) yesterday. “The’ worst feature is that my. club has never received any official notification of the objection so we had no chance of answering any arguments advanced by the Timaru club,” he said. . “We raced against Timaru last year and they showed an increase in on-course betting of $27,662, a factor hardly suggesting that our meeting had any adverse effect. “There used to be a ruling that no club could race on the same day against another racing less than 100 miles away. The distance between Washdyke and Motukarara is o.Bkm under the 100-mile mark, hardly sufficient to justify an' objection,” continued Mr Mugford. His club had experienced a most successful meeting last December with oh-course betting reaching $294,332. They had promoted it as a country-and-western ■ meeting and had attracted a crowd of

7558, with an estimated 5000 or 6000 children.

“The club had completed arrangements for another country-and-western meeting and had engaged artists to entertain the crowd. Also we’ve obtained sponsorship enabling us to offer record stakes mainly because the meeting was to have been run on a public holiday,” said Mr Mugford. “I’m not prepared to make any comment on the subject,” said the chief executive officer of the Trotting Conference (Mr John Rowley) when asked whether the

decision was reached on a vote between the racing and trotting codes, with the greyhound representative abstaining.

The combined committee cothprises four representatives each from racing and trotting and two representatives from the greyhound association.

Nor would Mr Rowley be drawn on the suggestion that one of the trotting representatives had gone to the Christchurch show before the Timaru objection to the Banks Peninsula date was considered.