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Facing $200k Shortfall, NJ Breeders’ Assn. Fails to Gain Commission Approval to Cut Incentives

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A proposal floated by the Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association of New Jersey (TBA) that would have significantly cut the cash awards the organization pays to the state’s horse breeders and owners failed to gain approval at Wednesday’s New Jersey Racing Commission (NJRC) meeting.

The measure, which was accompanied by the disclosure that the TBA has been unable to pay out $200,000 that is still due to breeders and owners who earned incentives at the 2025 Monmouth Park meet, got tabled until the July NJRC meeting by a 3-0 vote.

The money that pays for the incentives is generated by a percentage of handle.

Michael Campbell, the TBA’s executive director, said the organization is currently short of funding to the point where it was only able to make good on 88% of its incentives from last year’s meet.

“Coming into [2025] we had a little bit of a surplus from the prior year,” Campbell said at the May 27 meeting. “Our revenue since 2023 has decreased about $115,000. Our awards, our obligations, last year were about $1.6 million. That’s really where the shortfall was. And obviously, we had to take our [operating] budget out of that as well.”

Sara Ben-David, the NJRC’s acting executive director, read into the record an outline of the proposed changes the TBA wanted to make. The items that stood out were:

1) Dropping the awards to breeders from the 2025 levels (either 25% or 35% of the purse depending on whether the sire was a New Jersey stallion) to a flat 20%, regardless of the stallion’s state status;

2) Lowering the horse owners’ and stallion owners’ awards from 10% of the purse to 5%;

3) Capping maximum awards at $10,000.

The TBA was additionally requesting that the changes be made retroactive to the start of the 2026 Monmouth meet.

When asked by several commissioners if the proposed reductions would enable the TBA to make good on the outstanding 2025 payments by the end of 2026, Campbell said that was unlikely.

“That’s the difficult part. If we had additional revenue at the end of this year, which I’m not sure we’re going to have, the board would decide that at the time,” Campbell said. “But we’ll just keep it as a payable until we have it. If we have some, we’ll just chip away at it. But I don’t foresee us paying the additional $200,000 at the end of this year.”

Two of the three commissioners-they did not identify themselves when speaking-chimed in with concerns that by making the proposed reductions retroactive, the TBA would be breaking a promise to people who made breeding and ownership decisions as far back as several years ago on the on the current crop of racing-age horses.

“There is an obligation to satisfy them. I mean, that’s why they bred [in New Jersey],” one commissioner said.

“I still think those folks need to be made whole for the investment that they made,” said another commissioner.

Campbell admitted that “we probably should have lowered the caps last year.” He suggested that if an $8,000 limit had been implemented for 2025, “the obligation would have been fulfilled.”

Dennis Drazin, the chairman and chief executive officer of Darby Development LLC, which operates Monmouth, was one of several Jersey-based horsepeople to voice concerns about the cuts. Although Drazin at first said he was speaking as a longtime in-state horse breeder and not as a track executive, his comments eventually blended those two roles.

“This is not a new problem. This is a problem that has existed for a long time. There was a point in time in the past where the [TBA] owed [incentives of] several million dollars, because we got into this ‘couple hundred thousand every year’ and they never paid it, and the backlog got to an unreasonable number,” Drazin said.

“Fortunately, the [New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association] had funds at that point in time [that] enabled us to lend [$4 million] to the breeders, so they could pay all their awards, and they did pay us back over a period of time,” Drazin said.

“We have a lot of breeders who were not consulted about these changes,” Drazin said. “There was no general membership meeting. There was no information passed on. I know about the change because I requested a copy of what they submitted to the commission by way of the new program. But there are a lot of breeders that don’t even know that these requests are being made.”

Campbell admitted that the TBA’s board had come up with the plan on its own, adding that the topic would be addressed at a general membership meeting June 24.

Drazin pointed out other issues related to the TBA, its shortfall, and how participants might be affected in the coming season and beyond.

Drazin said one problem is that Monmouth is required by statute to card at one New Jersey-bred race per day. But the racing office is continually asked by owners and trainers to offer additional restricted opportunities, so in recent seasons, more state-bred races have ended up on the overnight.

“This year, we’re trying to keep a tight limit on this, given that they haven’t able to pay [awards dating back to] last year, and only write one a day,” Drazin said. “The breeders aren’t really happy about that [because] they’d rather run in Jersey-bred company than open company.

Another issue, Drazin said, has to do with the bonuses paid to Jersey-breds who do race successfully in open company.

“If they’re requesting that the component of the owner award goes down from 10% to 5%, we pay-Monmouth Park pays-40% in open company,” Drazin said. “And we’re not obligated to do that. We need revenues too.

“The agreement with the breeders in the past has been, ‘We want to see the breeders encouraged to breed in New Jersey, so we’re going to make sure collectively we get them 50% to run in open company,’” Drazin said.

“Because if you’re not writing the restricted races, they can run in the open races, and if you get in an extra bonus, it encourages you to go in that spot,” Drazin said.

“But if the breeders now want to change their program to reduce the owner component, Monmouth Park may not give them the 40% in open company. We may look at whether or not we should save money.”

Drazin also questioned aspects of the TBA budget, specifically the recent hiring of a lobbyist for $60,000, which he said was not something that has been a traditional expense for the organization.

“They’re taking that out of money that would otherwise be paid to the breeders,” Drazin said.

The post Facing $200k Shortfall, NJ Breeders’ Assn. Fails to Gain Commission Approval to Cut Incentives appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

With UC Davis-Commissioned Study Showing that Metformin Positives Can be a Result of Contamination, Jonathan Wong’s Team Weighing Legal Options

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A study done by the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California-Davis has revealed that a racehorse is likely to show a positive test result for metformin if its groom is taking the diabetes medication and urinates in the horse’s stall.

After a rash of metformin positives in 2024, anecdotal information surfaced that in many of these cases their grooms handling the horses had been on the drug. Metformin is used to manage blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes.

With the uncertainty over the metformin cases rising, HIWU put a stay on any enforcement until further scientific review could be conducted. HIWU has nine cases pending from 2024-25.

Not one trainer was hit harder for a metformin positive than Jonathan Wong. Wong was provisionally suspended in August, 2023 after being alerted that the B Sample confirmed the presence of metformin in a post-race test taken from his trainee, Heaven and Earth (Gormley). Wong, who denied all wrongdoing, was given a two-year suspension that began on July 1, 2023, and a $25,000 fine, along with having to pay back $8,000 in arbitration costs.

Wong resurfaced on Feb. 13, 2024 at the Fair Grounds, taking advantage of the fact that HISA and HIWU have no jurisdiction over Louisiana. He has not run a horse outside the state since.

Though his HIWU suspension ended last summer and there are no longer any charges pending against him, Wong has been marooned in Louisiana. His attorney, Brad Beilly, said part of the reason he has not sought to race outside of Louisiana is that he is struggling financially and is having a hard time coming up with the $33,000 he must pay to be reinstated by HISA.

In 2022, the last full year of training before he was suspended, Wong’s stable earned $5,391,479. His total earnings in 2025 were $1,615,070.

Wong said that he has been through so much since he was first hit with the positive that he will take a wait-and-see attitude.

“For me, this study is, I think, great news,” he said. “With the study that they did from UC Davis, they showed how it would take such a high level to make any effect on a horse and my level is still way, way, way below it. Yet, there was still no taking back of my suspension, nothing, no waving of my fine. For me, it’s tough to get optimistic at this point because everything that we’ve said…starting with the chain of custody, which there were important issues over. We brought in the question of chain of custody and laboratory testing and we proved all of it and none of it was to our benefit. They had zero intention to even really care. That’s why I have a hard time getting optimistic.”

Owner Brent Malmstrom, who has been a big supporter of Wong throughout his ordeal, maintains that had the information on metformin that is now available been made public when Wong first came onto HIWU’s radar, things would have been handled far differently.

“Jonathan Wong would not have been suspended,” Malmstrom said. “None of the things would’ve happened. And in fact, none of the cases that led to penalties or the positives as they relate to metformin would’ve even been charged. There are a lot of trainers out there who were wrongly charged.”

According to Malmstrom, HIWU has been in contact with the Wong legal team but has made offers that have been rejected.

“At the end of the day, they’ve offered to settle his case and we’ve rejected their offers because part of their consideration for settlement is that we have to agree to drop any and all lawsuits,” he said. “I don’t believe that what they’ve offered is enough restitution to make him whole.”

The next steps will be left up to Wong, Malmstrom and Beilly. They appear ready to take on HIWU and see where things lead in court. Beilly said seeking punitive damages is a possibility and a civil suit is likely.

“When HIWU announced that they were putting all the metformin cases on hold because they weren’t sure of the science and they were going to undertake these studies to get some answers, we specifically asked both HISA and HIWU to take Wong off of suspension and if they didn’t change the thresholds to put them back on when the studies were over and they refused,” Beilly said. “So Wong was the only person to be found liable under bad science. So the question now is what’s going to happen because HISA has acknowledged on the record in another case that they are not immune from a damages suit.”

“We’ve talked about (a lawsuit),” Malmstrom said. “The Federal Magistrate in the Phil Serpe case has had HIWU acknowledge and  HISA acknowledge that they can be sued. They’re not immune from responsibility. Even though they’ve hidden behind this, ‘we’re private entity, we’re a federal entity’–and have done so depending on which facts and circumstances suit their cause. So we will look at it. We’ll think which claims are the most appropriate and which jurisdiction is the most appropriate to file and go forward.”

Attorney Drew Mollica, who represented George Weaver in a metformin case, applauded HIWU for using science to get more definitive answers when it comes to metformin, but said it was too little too late.

“The regulations are written that you can’t challenge the validity of their science, which is completely counter to due process because the science is the only thing they have,” Mollica said. “Once they find a positive, they throw it back at the poor trainer and say, ‘Trainer responsibility, it’s completely your problem … Unless you can show us where.’ Well, sometimes you can’t show where something came from because it’s unfindable. So the science has to be able to be questioned. And without questioning the science, you’re just walking these people down a plank.

“The truth of the matter is HISA and HIWU have shown that they’re trying to move forward. But the truth is how do we put the broken eggs back together from the mistakes? How do we put these people back together?”

The post With UC Davis-Commissioned Study Showing that Metformin Positives Can be a Result of Contamination, Jonathan Wong’s Team Weighing Legal Options appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Facing $200k Shortfall, NJ Breeders’ Assn. Fails to Gain Commission Approval to Cut Incentives

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A proposal floated by the Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association of New Jersey (TBA) that would have significantly cut the cash awards the organization pays to the state’s horse breeders and owners failed to gain approval at Wednesday’s New Jersey Racing Commission (NJRC) meeting.

The measure, which was accompanied by the disclosure that the TBA has been unable to pay out $200,000 that is still due to breeders and owners who earned incentives at the 2025 Monmouth Park meet, got tabled until the July NJRC meeting by a 3-0 vote.

The money that pays for the incentives is generated by a percentage of handle.

Michael Campbell, the TBA’s executive director, said the organization is currently short of funding to the point where it was only able to make good on 88% of its incentives from last year’s meet.

“Coming into [2025] we had a little bit of a surplus from the prior year,” Campbell said at the May 27 meeting. “Our revenue since 2023 has decreased about $115,000. Our awards, our obligations, last year were about $1.6 million. That’s really where the shortfall was. And obviously, we had to take our [operating] budget out of that as well.”

Sara Ben-David, the NJRC’s acting executive director, read into the record an outline of the proposed changes the TBA wanted to make. The items that stood out were:

1) Dropping the awards to breeders from the 2025 levels (either 25% or 35% of the purse depending on whether the sire was a New Jersey stallion) to a flat 20%, regardless of the stallion’s state status;

2) Lowering the horse owners’ and stallion owners’ awards from 10% of the purse to 5%;

3) Capping maximum awards at $10,000.

The TBA was additionally requesting that the changes be made retroactive to the start of the 2026 Monmouth meet.

When asked by several commissioners if the proposed reductions would enable the TBA to make good on the outstanding 2025 payments by the end of 2026, Campbell said that was unlikely.

“That’s the difficult part. If we had additional revenue at the end of this year, which I’m not sure we’re going to have, the board would decide that at the time,” Campbell said. “But we’ll just keep it as a payable until we have it. If we have some, we’ll just chip away at it. But I don’t foresee us paying the additional $200,000 at the end of this year.”

Two of the three commissioners-they did not identify themselves when speaking-chimed in with concerns that by making the proposed reductions retroactive, the TBA would be breaking a promise to people who made breeding and ownership decisions as far back as several years ago on the on the current crop of racing-age horses.

“There is an obligation to satisfy them. I mean, that’s why they bred [in New Jersey],” one commissioner said.

“I still think those folks need to be made whole for the investment that they made,” said another commissioner.

Campbell admitted that “we probably should have lowered the caps last year.” He suggested that if an $8,000 limit had been implemented for 2025, “the obligation would have been fulfilled.”

Dennis Drazin, the chairman and chief executive officer of Darby Development LLC, which operates Monmouth, was one of several Jersey-based horsepeople to voice concerns about the cuts. Although Drazin at first said he was speaking as a longtime in-state horse breeder and not as a track executive, his comments eventually blended those two roles.

“This is not a new problem. This is a problem that has existed for a long time. There was a point in time in the past where the [TBA] owed [incentives of] several million dollars, because we got into this ‘couple hundred thousand every year’ and they never paid it, and the backlog got to an unreasonable number,” Drazin said.

“Fortunately, the [New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association] had funds at that point in time [that] enabled us to lend [$4 million] to the breeders, so they could pay all their awards, and they did pay us back over a period of time,” Drazin said.

“We have a lot of breeders who were not consulted about these changes,” Drazin said. “There was no general membership meeting. There was no information passed on. I know about the change because I requested a copy of what they submitted to the commission by way of the new program. But there are a lot of breeders that don’t even know that these requests are being made.”

Campbell admitted that the TBA’s board had come up with the plan on its own, adding that the topic would be addressed at a general membership meeting June 24.

Drazin pointed out other issues related to the TBA, its shortfall, and how participants might be affected in the coming season and beyond.

Drazin said one problem is that Monmouth is required by statute to card at one New Jersey-bred race per day. But the racing office is continually asked by owners and trainers to offer additional restricted opportunities, so in recent seasons, more state-bred races have ended up on the overnight.

“This year, we’re trying to keep a tight limit on this, given that they haven’t able to pay [awards dating back to] last year, and only write one a day,” Drazin said. “The breeders aren’t really happy about that [because] they’d rather run in Jersey-bred company than open company.

Another issue, Drazin said, has to do with the bonuses paid to Jersey-breds who do race successfully in open company.

“If they’re requesting that the component of the owner award goes down from 10% to 5%, we pay-Monmouth Park pays-40% in open company,” Drazin said. “And we’re not obligated to do that. We need revenues too.

“The agreement with the breeders in the past has been, ‘We want to see the breeders encouraged to breed in New Jersey, so we’re going to make sure collectively we get them 50% to run in open company,’” Drazin said.

“Because if you’re not writing the restricted races, they can run in the open races, and if you get in an extra bonus, it encourages you to go in that spot,” Drazin said.

“But if the breeders now want to change their program to reduce the owner component, Monmouth Park may not give them the 40% in open company. We may look at whether or not we should save money.”

Drazin also questioned aspects of the TBA budget, specifically the recent hiring of a lobbyist for $60,000, which he said was not something that has been a traditional expense for the organization.

“They’re taking that out of money that would otherwise be paid to the breeders,” Drazin said.

The post Facing $200k Shortfall, NJ Breeders’ Assn. Fails to Gain Commission Approval to Cut Incentives appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

With UC Davis-Commissioned Study Showing that Metformin Positives Can be a Result of Contamination, Jonathan Wong’s Team Weighing Legal Options

---

A study done by the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California-Davis has revealed that a racehorse is likely to show a positive test result for metformin if its groom is taking the diabetes medication and urinates in the horse’s stall.

After a rash of metformin positives in 2024, anecdotal information surfaced that in many of these cases their grooms handling the horses had been on the drug. Metformin is used to manage blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes.

With the uncertainty over the metformin cases rising, HIWU put a stay on any enforcement until further scientific review could be conducted. HIWU has nine cases pending from 2024-25.

Not one trainer was hit harder for a metformin positive than Jonathan Wong. Wong was provisionally suspended in August, 2023 after being alerted that the B Sample confirmed the presence of metformin in a post-race test taken from his trainee, Heaven and Earth (Gormley). Wong, who denied all wrongdoing, was given a two-year suspension that began on July 1, 2023, and a $25,000 fine, along with having to pay back $8,000 in arbitration costs.

Wong resurfaced on Feb. 13, 2024 at the Fair Grounds, taking advantage of the fact that HISA and HIWU have no jurisdiction over Louisiana. He has not run a horse outside the state since.

Though his HIWU suspension ended last summer and there are no longer any charges pending against him, Wong has been marooned in Louisiana. His attorney, Brad Beilly, said part of the reason he has not sought to race outside of Louisiana is that he is struggling financially and is having a hard time coming up with the $33,000 he must pay to be reinstated by HISA.

In 2022, the last full year of training before he was suspended, Wong’s stable earned $5,391,479. His total earnings in 2025 were $1,615,070.

Wong said that he has been through so much since he was first hit with the positive that he will take a wait-and-see attitude.

“For me, this study is, I think, great news,” he said. “With the study that they did from UC Davis, they showed how it would take such a high level to make any effect on a horse and my level is still way, way, way below it. Yet, there was still no taking back of my suspension, nothing, no waving of my fine. For me, it’s tough to get optimistic at this point because everything that we’ve said…starting with the chain of custody, which there were important issues over. We brought in the question of chain of custody and laboratory testing and we proved all of it and none of it was to our benefit. They had zero intention to even really care. That’s why I have a hard time getting optimistic.”

Owner Brent Malmstrom, who has been a big supporter of Wong throughout his ordeal, maintains that had the information on metformin that is now available been made public when Wong first came onto HIWU’s radar, things would have been handled far differently.

“Jonathan Wong would not have been suspended,” Malmstrom said. “None of the things would’ve happened. And in fact, none of the cases that led to penalties or the positives as they relate to metformin would’ve even been charged. There are a lot of trainers out there who were wrongly charged.”

According to Malmstrom, HIWU has been in contact with the Wong legal team but has made offers that have been rejected.

“At the end of the day, they’ve offered to settle his case and we’ve rejected their offers because part of their consideration for settlement is that we have to agree to drop any and all lawsuits,” he said. “I don’t believe that what they’ve offered is enough restitution to make him whole.”

The next steps will be left up to Wong, Malmstrom and Beilly. They appear ready to take on HIWU and see where things lead in court. Beilly said seeking punitive damages is a possibility and a civil suit is likely.

“When HIWU announced that they were putting all the metformin cases on hold because they weren’t sure of the science and they were going to undertake these studies to get some answers, we specifically asked both HISA and HIWU to take Wong off of suspension and if they didn’t change the thresholds to put them back on when the studies were over and they refused,” Beilly said. “So Wong was the only person to be found liable under bad science. So the question now is what’s going to happen because HISA has acknowledged on the record in another case that they are not immune from a damages suit.”

“We’ve talked about (a lawsuit),” Malmstrom said. “The Federal Magistrate in the Phil Serpe case has had HIWU acknowledge and  HISA acknowledge that they can be sued. They’re not immune from responsibility. Even though they’ve hidden behind this, ‘we’re private entity, we’re a federal entity’–and have done so depending on which facts and circumstances suit their cause. So we will look at it. We’ll think which claims are the most appropriate and which jurisdiction is the most appropriate to file and go forward.”

Attorney Drew Mollica, who represented George Weaver in a metformin case, applauded HIWU for using science to get more definitive answers when it comes to metformin, but said it was too little too late.

“The regulations are written that you can’t challenge the validity of their science, which is completely counter to due process because the science is the only thing they have,” Mollica said. “Once they find a positive, they throw it back at the poor trainer and say, ‘Trainer responsibility, it’s completely your problem … Unless you can show us where.’ Well, sometimes you can’t show where something came from because it’s unfindable. So the science has to be able to be questioned. And without questioning the science, you’re just walking these people down a plank.

“The truth of the matter is HISA and HIWU have shown that they’re trying to move forward. But the truth is how do we put the broken eggs back together from the mistakes? How do we put these people back together?”

The post With UC Davis-Commissioned Study Showing that Metformin Positives Can be a Result of Contamination, Jonathan Wong’s Team Weighing Legal Options appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.