An official for the New York Racing Association asked state legislators to increase the association’s share of a tax on account wagers and to allow NYRA to offer sports betting during a virtual hearing held on Thursday. Jeffrey Cannizzo, who was hired late last year as NYRA’s senior director of government affairs, made the requests while giving a lengthy presentation to the New York Assembly Standing Committee on Racing and Wagering and then again while answering questions posed by committee members. The Assembly committee is chaired by J. Gary Pretlow, a longtime state legislator who has frequently represented racing interests in their legislative efforts. In total, the hearing amounted to a public airing of the legislative wish lists for the various segments of the state’s racing and breeding industries. Including Cannizzo, seven speakers were allowed to provide testimony, and all seven made requests to the committee to take up efforts to help their businesses. Cannizzo told the committee that New York’s Thoroughbred tracks split 24 percent of the 5 percent tax on out-of-state wagers on its races, while New York’s off-track betting companies split 40 percent and the Standardbred industry splits 16 percent. He argued that NYRA’s account-wagering operation, NYRA Bets, is at a “disadvantage” compared to out-of-state account-wagering operators because of its status as a racetrack operator with obligations to its horsemen. A committee member, Carrie Woerner, whose district includes Saragota Springs, asked Cannizzo during the question-and-answer period whether the legislature should “be looking at different splits in that market-recourse fee to reflect that the OTBs are a thing of the past?” Cannizzo replied that betting on horse racing is increasingly migrating toward mobile betting applications and away from “bricks-and-mortar locations” to argue for reducing the OTBs’ share of the tax. He compared NYRA’s operations to a “Broadway show” and said that sending money to the OTBs was akin to paying a “middle man.” “We need to protect our New York interests and we need to protect the people who are putting on the show,” Cannizzo said. Following Cannizzo’s presentation, Joseph Appelbaum, the president of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, also told the legislators that NYRA deserves a greater cut of the account-wagering tax, and he also asked legislators to look at the state’s regulations in order to “modernize and streamline our wagering systems.” Betting revenues in New York are currently split up through a byzantine patchwork of regulations devised decades ago. Appelbaum also said that the legislature could step in to address what he called an “imbalance” in payments from account-wagering companies to racetracks. Payments to racetracks from account-wagering companies are currently set in contracts negotiated between the two parties. “The [account-wagering companies] are taking 70 percent of the revenue and the creators of the product are getting 30 or 40 percent of the revenue,” Appelbaum said. On sports wagering, Cannizzo re-iterated that NYRA believes it should be given the authority to offer sports bets, and said in response to a question from a committee member that NYRA would be able to quickly launch a sports-betting option on its existing mobile betting platform if given the go-ahead. “We believe we would see significant growth in horse racing handle if we sat alongside other sports,” Cannizzo said. “If that’s the case, we all win.” Sports betting is currently legal in New York at four upstate casino locations due to an unusual law passed in 2014 that authorized the practice at the casinos only if the Supreme Court invalidated a law that prohibited states from allowing sports betting. That happened in 2018. Earlier this week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that he supported a plan to allow one mobile sports-betting operator to be licensed in the state, in partnership with an existing casino. NYRA officials have pushed to be included in sports betting for several years. Najja Thompson, the executive director of New York Thoroughbred Breeders Inc., told the committee that his organization is “in full step” with NYRA and its horsemen on its requests to be included in sports-wagering legislation and “revising the outdated advance-deposit wagering model.” Peter Venaglia, the first vice president of the Standardbred Owners Association of New York, told the committee that standardbred tracks should be able to offer sports wagering as well. At the close of the meeting, Aileen M. Gunther, a committee member who represents a patch of counties northwest of New York City, thanked the speakers who provided testimony. “We plan on working with you and helping out any way we can,” she said.