Rideau Carleton Raceway Spokesman Alex Lawryk has said that officials at the Ottawa-area racetrack have been "taken aback" in light of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp.'s announcements that they will be pulling out of the Slots at Racetracks partnership as of March 31, 2013, leaving the track in limbo. “We believed we were good partners and running a successful program,” he said
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Lawryk's comments have come courtesy of an article in the Ottawa Citizen. The report also quoted him as saying that he believes one of the reasons why Rideau Carleton Raceway had been selected as a location for slot machines was "because it didn’t impact any community negatively.”
Lawryk believes that building a new casino at an urban location to go up against the current Gatineau casino would not necessarily be a good idea.
“To build a downtown casino that would be competitive with Gatineau is very expensive. And we caution everybody not to jump to conclusions that it would be successful. That’s what they did in Windsor and it didn’t turn out that way. The Gatineau casino is paid for and it’s valued at half a billion dollars. To build something comparable and competitive would be very expensive and you would need a fair chunk of land to do it.”
Another article by the Ottawa Citizen has quoted Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson as saying that the slots should stay at the raceway until a potential new casino is built.
“We wouldn’t want to have that gap and we wouldn’t want to lose the revenue for the city,” he was quoted as saying.
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