The enforcement action that threatened to go dark on Kentucky Derby Day is resolved — on terms no one in the industry may ever be permitted to know.
Here is everything HISA and Churchill Downs Inc. want you to know about how they resolved the most consequential regulatory enforcement action in HISA’s history: the case has been settled, the March 26 payment deadline has been stayed, and the dispute over 2025 delinquent fees is on its way to full dismissal.
Here is everything else: nothing. No terms. No dollar amounts. No public comment from either party. A one-page HISA order issued yesterday — staying the March 16 ruling that had demanded $5.27 million plus interest within ten days or face wagering bans at Churchill Downs, Turfway Park, Ellis Park, and Presque Isle Downs — pending satisfaction of conditions that, like the rest of the agreement, remain undisclosed.
The industry was told this fight mattered. Apparently it only mattered until it was time to tell you how it ended.
They invoked transparency and integrity to build this authority. They used a one-page order to bury how they used it.
What Actually Happened
The timeline is important, because it exposes how quickly a public regulatory crisis became a private resolution once the Kentucky Derby’s simulcast handle was on the table.
In December 2024, Churchill Downs Inc. and NYRA jointly sued HISA and the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that HISA’s fee assessment methodology — which blended racing starts and purse levels, meaning high-purse operations like Churchill bore a disproportionate share — exceeded the authority’s congressional mandate. Weeks later, the FTC approved HISA’s proposed shift to a starts-only model, effective January 2026. NYRA, seeing its immediate financial concern resolved, settled its portion of the lawsuit in early January 2025. Terms confidential.
Churchill stayed in the fight. And through the entire 2025 calendar year, CDI paid HISA exactly nothing — not under the purse-weighted formula, not under the starts-only calculation it had advocated for. By HISA’s own accounting, CDI was the only racetrack operator under its jurisdiction that paid zero in 2025.
On February 18, HISA issued formal complaints covering Churchill Downs, Turfway Park, Ellis Park, and Presque Isle Downs. A three-member board panel convened. On March 16, that panel issued its order: pay approximately $5.27 million within ten days or lose the ability to simulcast races to out-of-state locations — an existential threat to a sport whose lifeblood is interstate wagering, and a direct threat to Derby Day, on which $349 million was wagered last year.
On March 19, attorneys for both sides appeared before U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton in Louisville. The hearing largely rehearsed arguments already in the record. The judge did not rule, but by multiple accounts his questioning raised concerns about the legal foundation of HISA’s pre-2026 funding methodology.
Then, within days, a one-page stay order. Settlement conditions pending. Full dismissal to follow. No dollar figure. No comment.
What ‘Settled’ Actually Means — And Doesn’t
Let’s be precise about what this resolution does and does not resolve, because the framing matters.
The enforcement action covering the 2025 delinquent fees — the $5.27 million payment order, the simulcast ban threat, the board panel proceedings — is being resolved through this settlement. That dispute is headed for dismissal once the undisclosed conditions are met.
What is not resolved: the underlying federal lawsuit over HISA’s fee calculation methodology. The question of whether HISA’s purse-weighted assessment for 2025 exceeded its statutory authority — the constitutional and Administrative Procedure Act challenge CDI filed in December 2024 — continues in the Western District of Kentucky. That case, and whatever legal precedent it may set, remains alive.
That distinction is significant. It means the settlement likely addresses what CDI owed and what CDI will pay for 2025. It does not, on its face, resolve the broader question of whether HISA’s assessment methodology was legal in the first place — a question whose answer could affect every track that paid those fees without CDI’s leverage to refuse.
Every track that paid HISA’s purse-weighted fees without complaint deserves to know what CDI paid to make this go away.
The Questions the Industry Deserves Answered
The amount CDI paid — or agreed to pay, or was forgiven from paying — is not a private business matter. It is a regulatory enforcement outcome. It sets the floor for what happens when the sport’s most powerful operator refuses to comply with a federal authority for an entire calendar year. Every horsemen’s group, every track operator, every owner writing an assessment check needs to understand that floor.
Did CDI pay the full $5.27 million ordered by the board panel? A negotiated portion? Were the 2023 and 2024 back assessments — separately the subject of an enforcement action totaling $1.7 million — included or excluded from this resolution? Did HISA agree to any forward-looking concessions on methodology, compliance timelines, or enforcement posture?
Was Judge Beaton’s apparent skepticism about the pre-2026 model a factor? Did HISA settle partly because a judicial ruling on the methodology’s legality would have created binding precedent it couldn’t afford?
We do not know. You do not know. No one outside the room where this was negotiated knows. That is a governance failure dressed up as a business resolution.
The Pattern Is the Story
This publication has spent months documenting a specific and recurring dynamic in Thoroughbred racing’s power structure: institutions that wave the flag of transparency operate in near-total opacity when the stakes are high enough.
The Jockey Club — a 501(c)(5) sitting on substantial reserves, holding equity in Equibase, and having provided HISA its startup capital on terms never publicly disclosed — declined a public forum while insisting it communicates through channels that support ‘thoughtful and good-faith conversation.’ Their definition of good faith: conversations they control.
Breeders’ Cup Limited holds over $100 million in financial reserves built from fees paid by every participant in the sport, governed by a certificate of incorporation the industry has never been permitted to read. We’ve asked. The questions remain unanswered.
And now HISA — the federal quasi-governmental authority created specifically to replace racing’s historically opaque governance with something accountable and uniform — has sealed its most significant enforcement resolution and issued a one-page order that tells the industry exactly as much as these institutions have always told it: enough to know something happened, not enough to know what.
NYRA set the template in January 2025. Terms confidential. Churchill has now followed. Terms undisclosed. The authority that exists to hold the sport accountable has decided that accountability, like transparency, applies to everyone except the people in the room.
What Past The Wire Is Asking
We are asking HISA and Churchill Downs Inc., directly and on the record, to disclose the material terms of this settlement. Specifically:
The total amount paid or agreed to be paid by CDI as part of this resolution, including any amounts attributed to 2023, 2024, and 2025 assessments.
Whether any assessment fees were waived, reduced, or deferred as part of the agreement.
Whether the settlement includes any agreement about CDI’s ongoing assessment obligations or methodology disputes going forward.
Whether the confidentiality of terms was requested by CDI, by HISA, or by mutual agreement — and the stated justification for sealing a regulatory enforcement outcome.
These are not proprietary business questions. They are questions about how a federally authorized regulatory body enforced — or declined to fully enforce — its own rules against the sport’s most powerful commercial operator, days before the most-wagered event in American racing.
If HISA’s mission is integrity, this is where integrity is measured. Not in a fatality rate report. Not in a press release. In whether the authority built to bring transparency to this sport is willing to be held to the same standard it exists to enforce on everyone else. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
We Don’t Get Fooled Again, Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss,
