Roberta Nixon, Executive Director of Horse Racing New Brunswick, promises that business will be back to normal very soon after the organization was locked out of its office in the middle of the night.
“Fredericton Exhibition locked us out and cited numerous lease breaches,” Nixon said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon. “We have our legal representatives working on this because, as per our signed lease, HRNB was not in any violation of the current lease agreement.”
The disagreement stems from an attempt to pay the property taxes to Fredericton Exhibition on May 16. The lease says the taxes are payable to Fredericton Exhibition and are due on the 15, which fell on a Sunday this year. The lease also says that late payments would be accepted thirty (30) days after the due date. Fredericton Exhibition refused HRNB’s payment on May 16 and in the early morning of May 17 changed the locks, alarm codes and hired a security firm.
“This is simply a dishonest approach by Fredericton Exhibition,” Nixon said. “Our lease gives us a thirty day grace period. We tried to pay eighteen hours into that grace period and were received with aggression.
“The sad part about this underhanded approach from Fredericton Exhibition is that basically puts a number of employees out of a job,” Nixon said. “My main goal is to get this solved, get our people back to work and resume HRNB operations in Fredericton as soon as possible.”
Nixon stressed that HRNB operations out of Saint John, Dieppe and Quispamsis were operating as normal and should not be disrupted by the situation in Fredericton.
(with files from HRNB)