Is New York City finally getting out of the bookie business?
Mayor Bloomberg put the city’s anemic Off-Track Betting Corp. on death watch yesterday, refusing a cash infusion that would keep it afloat past next June and asking its president to draft a plan to cease operations.
“I’ve always had reservations about city government being involved in gambling,” Mayor Mike explained, “but it is entirely wrong for the city to lose taxpayer money funding such a questionable endeavor.”
To be sure, OTB, which operates a slew of betting parlors across the city, has come a long way since Rudy Giuliani famously called it “the only bookie operation in the world losing money”: It actually turned a gross profit of $125 million last year.
But thanks to an odious revenue-sharing deal, OTB then had to send Albany $134 million – leaving it $9 million in the hole.
It’s entirely possible, of course, that Bloomberg is simply playing a game of political chicken with Albany: Stop soaking city taxpayers, or else take your big fat cut of . . . zero.
Either way, it’s hard to see what the city has to lose.
In the worst-case scenario, New York rids itself of a money-losing enterprise it probably should’ve never undertaken in the first place.
In the best of worlds, once Albany re-negotiates, the city could simply sell the whole operation. The private sector, after all, is where such activity rightly belongs.