Kudos to Joanna for her series on the Yavapai Downs fiasco, and to the editors for devoting a lot of space and resources to an issue that deserves serious research and long-form treatment. The last in the five-day series runs today, with links to the rest.The track has been in trouble from the beginning, and I can't count the hours I've listened to track employees and customers count down the sins and weaknesses of the track managers.
It would have been useful to see this series come out long before the house of cards collapsed. I and many other readers have been urging the Courier to put more work into background and document research for years, to better inform the community about what's behind the stories that customarily flit through the paper unconsidered. Here's a cookie. I hope it helps motivate more timely work in the future.
If you read the series and the courier regularly you'd know that most of the series is a reprinting of what the courier did in years past. the warning signs were there and the courier has been covering it all along.
ReplyDeleteAh, welcome back, O bold anonymous Courier employee!
ReplyDeletePerhaps you'd like to cite Courier articles from 2010 or earlier detailing total debt held by the nonprofits (perhaps their boards should have been reading the Courier as well, as it's apparently news to them), continuous management incompetence by Jim Grundy et al., the money flows and dependencies related to horse racing and betting, the challenges faced by the motor racing operation, or the cascading failures to make payments. Show me what I missed.
I would like to suggest that they turn the buildings at Yavapai downs into factories for manufacturing buggy whips. It would be the most appropriate use for those facilities.
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