Things are starting to get back to normal for Western Regional OTB.

"Horse racing season has been very busy," President Henry Wojtaszek said. "Saratoga just had a record day for the Whitney this past Saturday. Not a lot of other things to wager on so horse racing has been pretty busy."

Live racing began at OTB's Batavia Downs facility last week, but with no spectators. Wojtaszek said the gaming floor remains closed there as well.

"It's been very, very rough," he said. "It'll be coming up on five months here and we will probably have lost about $30 million during that period of time so it's been very, very difficult."

Three-hundred employees in Batavia have been on furlough since July 10 while continuing to receive health insurance coverage. OTB has also weathered pandemic losses with a more than $3 million Paycheck Protection Program loan it expects the federal government to fully forgive.

Although some local lawmakers have raised questions about the use of that loan, Wojtaszek defended it.

"We believe the program was very successful," he said. "It accomplished exactly what it was intended for, which was to make sure that our workers were paid for those eight weeks that the program ran. We paid their benefits. We paid our leases. We paid utilities and it was a very good program as far as we're concerned."

The president said when the public benefit corporation is successful, state and local governments in Western New York win.

"It goes back to the state in the form of education assistance," Wojtaszek said. "It goes back to the communities that comprise our board of directors, the various counties and the cities. Obviously it goes to pay our employees and our vendors so everybody's been hurt across the board."

He said the loss of revenue makes the state Legislature's approval of sports betting at OTB facilities more important than ever. The corporation has been lobbying to be included in an online gaming bill for several years, but he believes perhaps it has a better chance this year.

"They are going to go back to Albany, we understand, to look at some ways of raising revenue for the state and we hope that sports betting is one of the ways they choose to raise revenues for the state," he said.

Wojtaszek said there are many different proposals, and legislators are still trying to decide if online sports betting should be brought in the form of a constitutional amendment or a state law.