They never got along and Mr. D always would force Meeker's hand on decisions....When Arlington Park was acquired by CDI it was supposed to be an acquisition...it turned out to be more like a merger because Mr. D has lined the board with his cronies and they block vote what they want done and force Meeker (now Evans) to enforce it.....When they wanted to cut cost earlier this summer, Mr. D asked for the hacking of human resources and Meeker fought it until he couldn't figjht it any longer and they fired 15 employees...But hey, it is bottomline driven like most corporations....once CDI sold Hollywood cause they couldn't get slots and once the hurricanes and tornados crushed Calder, Fair Grounds and Ellis - the business and revenues shrunk to such that their corporate infrastructure that was built up to support a growing business and multi-track operation now was too big and too costly relative to the properties that made up their significantly smaller operation - Thus, they hacked all specialized departments like mine...

As for Mr. D....he is so bold and against company policy that he makes Arlington exempt to all CDI corporate policies....that is why Arlington Park has that ****ty graphics package this year (if you have noticed) that is not uniform to the other CDI owned tracks, and he refuses CDI branding at his facilities on many things....he even just recently authorized the change of the Arlington PArk website so thta it no longer looks and operated uniformly to the other CDI track sites....the guy hates CDI and just needed them to dig Arlington out of the hole that they were in for a while....now he is single handedly ruining the corporation because all he carse about is Arlington Park....he could care less about the Derby, etc. from what I have heard from good sources...

Things will only get worse IMO as long as he remains the single largest stock holder of CDI and has the board in his pocket. CDI just sscrewed up and tied themselves into a horrible deal with that guy...but then again, CDI has a rich history of tying themselves into some horrible deals....