On behalf of the Town of Vinton, please accept these comments regarding the final draft regulations for Historical Horse Racing terminals.

The Town of Vinton is a community of approximately 8,100 residents and is located within the Roanoke Metropolitan Statistical Area with a population over 300,000. In 2003, the citizens of Vinton voted by referendum to allow Off-Track betting within the Town limits and Town Council followed suit by including such facilities within the zoning regulations of our Town Code in 2004.

Our Town Council and administration has expressed enthusiastic support for Historical Horse Racing by unanimously passing a Resolution of Support on September 4, 2018 to authorize the return of OTB and the use of HHR terminals within the Town of Vinton.

However, the regulations as currently written fall short of allowing our citizens and our community to realize the full positive impact that the return of horse racing and the allowance of HHR would provide for SW Virginia, and will certainly limit the positive financial benefit on our small Town within the Roanoke Region.

By unnecessarily limiting the number of HHR terminals based on population alone, this cap will greatly diminish a valuable opportunity to allow us to expand employment opportunities and generate much needed revenue to provide services for our residents of Vinton and guests to our community.

On behalf of the Town of Vinton and the Greater Roanoke Region, our strong recommendation is to remove from the regulations the constraint of limiting the number terminals based on a boundary population alone and allow the decision of the number of terminals to be based on the Roanoke MSA Population, as a better indicator of market demand.

Thank you for considering the Town of Vinton’s input.

Best regards,

Richard "Pete" Peters, Assistant Town Manager