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track itself is a good one with a long straight, the appointments are as good as can be expected having regard to the fact that the club's tenure is very unsatisfactory. 304. The Commission of 1911 urged that some permanently-assured tenure of the course should be acquired from the agricultural and pastoral association. This has never been done. The club, in common with the trotting club, is renting the course for the very limited period of two years only. It was apparently found advisable to rent the whole property so that, by controlling the grazing, the track which, in past years, has suffered depreciation through sheep-tracks being cut in it in all directions, might be preserved from damage. It appears that there is some possibility that when the present lease expires an agreement will be made by which the two racing clubs and the agricultural and pastoral association will become joint owners of the property. In default of some such arrangement, attention to the very unsatisfactory position of both the racing and trotting clubs will need to be given at the end of the present lease. It would be uneconomic for the two clubs separately or in conjunction to acquire a new course and embark upon the expenditure which the capital improvements necessary would require. It is to be hoped that some satisfatory assurance of possession more or less permanent can be obtained. In the meantime, neither club can be considered for an increase in totalizator days. SECTION S.—RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ALLOTMENT OF NINETEEN NEW, AND REDISTRIBUTION OF TWO EXISTING TROTTING TOTALIZATOR DAYS 305. In making these specific recommendations we have taken what we believe to be all relevant factors into account. We have not recommended the issue of any additional permits to any metropolitan club. Each of those clubs has, in our view, a sufficient number of days racing already, and the extra provision for the qualifying of horses which our recommendations, if given effect, will make, should enable them to concentrate more on races for which only horses in the tighter classes are eligible. For the rest, if they continue desirous, as they have been in the past, of providing an opportunity for maiden and looserclass horses to qualify for tighter-class races, they will doubtless continue to hold matinee meeting as heretofore. Those meetings, involving as they do the absence of betting and the entry of the public free of charge, are a symbol of the spirit of good sportsmanship and of the desire to advance the sport in which they are interested which have actuated trotting administrators in the past. In connection with metropolitan centres it must always be taken into account that there is already in each such centre an abundance of days in the aggregate devoted to galloping and trotting, on which the public have the opportunity of betting.

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