Town Divided Over Proposed Racetrack

For generations this was a farm town, plain and simple, basking under big shade trees in the Central Valley heat. Lately, it has grown subdivisions faster than crops, becoming a bedroom community for nearby Sacramento.

But now the small city of 15,000 is wrestling over the prospects and pitfalls of joining horse racing’s future.

Frank Stronach, an Austrian-born billionaire who made his fortune in auto parts but lives for the thoroughbreds, recently proposed a 21st century racetrack and entertainment complex for 225 acres of corn and safflower fields on Dixon’s northern edge. Stronach wants to draw patrons to concerts, rodeos and restaurants--and keep horse racing alive in the process.

Residents have been abuzz ever since the tycoon stepped into town.

In a city where workers outnumber jobs by a wide margin, many within Dixon’s old guard establishment opened their arms to the possibility, seeing the horse racing complex as a potential boon for municipal coffers and employment rolls.

“Any time somebody comes in and wants to invest $80 million in your community, it bears looking at,” Mayor Don Erickson said. “If you’re going to have progress, it’s going to involve change, and to get through that you sometimes have some anger.”

But a testy band of residents has begun to organize against the project--many of them big-city professionals and other newcomers who want to preserve the community’s character.

They grumble that the complex would snarl traffic for commuters hurrying to Interstate 80 and jobs in Sacramento, 20 miles to the east. City services such as police and fire protection would be drained, they say, and business in Dixon’s antique and sleepy downtown would fade. They also worry that the complex could bring a bad element to Dixon, boosting crime and other urban ills.

But mostly, they fear the intangible, the possibility that so big and blustery an undertaking could undermine the small-town charm that has survived Dixon’s transformation into a community orbiting on the urban edge.

“Dixon would be easy to ruin with the wrong type of development,” said Jeanne Kluge, an attorney raising a family in one of the city’s new subdivisions. “This seems like putting an atom bomb in the middle of town.”

Stronach, who was on business in Europe and unavailable for comment, is chief of Toronto-based Magna International Inc., the world’s largest maker of auto parts, with 164 manufacturing plants and 54,000 employees. He also is one of North America’s most successful horsemen, with a trio of barns and about 1,000 thoroughbreds in training.

His entertainment group, a spinoff of the auto parts empire, has quickly become one of the top players as the horse racing industry grapples to reinvent itself after decades of declining attendance.

Magna Entertainment owns more than a half-dozen tracks, including Santa Anita in Arcadia and Golden Gate Fields just across the bridge from San Francisco. Stronach’s tracks accounted for 23% of all betting on thoroughbreds in the United States last year, and his empire could grow with plans for several more new tracks and a $5-million commitment to launch an interactive parimutuel wagering system tapping TV and the Internet.

The most recent acquisition by Magna was Bay Meadows in the Bay Area city of San Mateo. But the track came with a catch--Magna can operate in San Mateo only through 2002, when the landowner plans to uproot the whole works to make way for a Silicon Valley office complex.

Enter Dixon. Situated along the busy Interstate 80 freeway, the little city seems to Magna officials an ideal site for a track. Not only is sports-crazy Sacramento just up the freeway, but the Bay Area’s booming eastern suburbs are less than an hour away.

Magna officials negotiated to purchase a big parcel near a freeway interchange, then approached city officials with a loosely defined proposal for horse racing and entertainment.

Stronach rolled into City Hall in late July, doffing his business suit for casual clothes and describing himself as a farmer. The billionaire told the City Council he wants a “win-win situation” with the city. If residents “decide they don’t want us here,” he said, “we can go somewhere else.”

Dixon’s civic leaders liked what they saw enough to accept $50,000 from Magna to study the project.

To date, the details remain sketchy. Stronach and other Magna officials have talked of a 1 1/8-mile main course, a 1-mile turf track and enough barn space for 2,000 horses.

The Dixon facility might seat about 7,000--about a third as many as some older tracks. Magna officials also are toying with the possibility of restaurants, a 5,000-seat auditorium and show grounds that might attract everything from rodeos to concerts and entertainment acts.

“We’d like to draw all types of people from all walks of life,” said Ron Volkman, a Magna director. In the process, the daily gate at the track could get a boost.

“We’re treading very carefully,” he said. “We want to work with everyone.”

Such words hardly assuage folks like Alice Ramsey. A lawyer, newly arrived to Dixon with her 12-year-old daughter, Ramsey wanted a place to plant a garden and put down roots.

She has spent more than 100 hours on the Internet checking out Stronach and Magna. And she sees trouble.

Foes in Dixon worry that a track could eventually draw video poker machines, card games and other forms of casino-style gambling. Undergirding the concern, two officials at Magna Entertainment have ties to Las Vegas casinos.

Before a recent Dixon council meeting, opponents handed out leaflets warning that Stronach wants to “buy” Dixon and turn it into “a Las Vegas-style gambling mecca” with increased crime, traffic and “nonstop partying on a daily basis.”

Others say any payoff in jobs is outweighed by the risks.

“The only jobs they’ll bring is a lot of people shoveling horse manure,” said Councilman Chris Manson, the track’s biggest critic in city government.

Such arguments failed to sway Manson’s council colleagues, who on Aug. 8 rejected a proposal to put the track’s fate immediately on the ballot. They say Stronach needs to be given a chance before people pass judgment.

Ramsey and other foes talk of gathering signatures to force a special election early next year.

“I don’t think people have a clue what they’re dealing with,” Ramsey said.

Magna officials say they hope to assuage the fears before residents get even more riled up. With lamentably flagging crowds, they say, modern tracks rarely cause traffic jams. Nor are they magnets for crime, Volkman said, noting that “Nordstrom has more police calls than Bay Meadows.”

As for the two Magna officials with Vegas backgrounds, Volkman said, both David Mitchell, formerly of Caesar’s World Inc., and J. Terrence Lanni, chairman of MGM Grand Inc., were tapped because they are avid horsemen.

“We’re racing purists,” Volkman said. “Magna has no background in Las Vegas-style gaming. We’ve shown no interest in it.”

John Van de Kamp, president of the Thoroughbred Owners of California and former state attorney general, sees potential in Stronach’s vision. A multiuse entertainment facility, he said, “might bring in just regular folks, attract a critical mass” needed to keep such a facility--and thoroughbred racing in general--afloat.

Erickson, Dixon’s mayor, estimates a successful track could bring more than $1.5 million to the city in taxes and a cut of wagering.

The mayor, a retired dentist who has lived in Dixon for 35 years, finds it particularly objectionable that some residents opposing the proposal arrived in town only a few months ago.

Erickson remembers the old days, when Dixon consisted of 2,800 residents and a slaughterhouse populated by 200 cattle and sheep “ready to become steaks and chops the next day.” The only other real going concerns were a pair of alfalfa pellet plants that left a green sheen of dust downwind.

“We had so much small-town charm,” Erickson said, “it was objectionable to some people.”

Those industries have all died, with few replacements. A track could be a boon to flagging farmers, who could shift more to the equine industry. In the meantime, he said, the city’s lopsided ledger of houses to jobs could be helped “before we become an even worse bedroom community.”

A track, Erickson concluded, “could be a transfusion.”