Celebrating its Australian centenary next year, greyhound racing looks likely to return to Orange after approval for a $16 million redevelopment of the former trotting track on the city’s eastern edge.

The state-of-the-art facility is planned on the site of the former Orange Harness Racing headquarters at Perc Griffith Way, closed a decade ago when the sport moved to Orange Racing’s Towac Park complex.

The NSW Greyhound Breeders, Owners and Trainers Association (GBOTA) project involves redeveloping the circuit into a new track, 112-kennel facility, clubhouse, and parking, all designed to return weekly greyhound racing to the district.

The unanimous decision by the Western Regional Planning Panel (WRPP) was despite Orange Council — originally supporters of the proposal — recently passing a resolution opposing the DA (development application) before its final assessment by the panel.

The council about-face followed a high-profile campaign against the development with more than a dozen opponents also fronting a WRPP public hearing to argue against the plan, citing animal welfare and gambling issues.

However, one local representative who opposed council's motion, Councillor Kevin Duffy, said that the WRRP decision was a foregone conclusion.

“I’ve got no particular views on greyhound racing, but I am a supporter of the planning laws; and they had approval for that block of land,” Cr Duffy told Orange City Life.

“That’s why I supported it 100 per cent, they met the planning requirements, as council knew, and then they went and voted against their own decision,” he added.

He said that the unanimous vote from the four-person WRPP bore out this view, with any other decision likely to lead to a lengthy, expensive, and ultimately futile case before the Land and Environment Court which would have ultimately approved the DA anyway.

Opponents to the Orange greyhound racing facility included the Community Before Greyhound Tracks group, with a petition urging the council to oppose the plan gathering more than 1100 signatures.

Council, however, had earlier given a thumbs-up to the GBOTA initiative to buy the old trotting track from council.

Approval for the DA though been passed to the panel to avoid potential conflict of interest issues to do with council approving a sale to which it is also a beneficiary.

With local greyhound racing ending with closure of the traditional grass track at Wade Park in 2005 and severe flooding destroying the facility at the Bathurst Council-owned dog track at Kennerson Park in 2022, local trainers and owners have had to travel to venues like Dubbo for competitive racing.

Before the WRPP decision was announced, Orange councillor Jeff Whitton had also told Orange City Life that valid reasons to oppose DAs cannot usually cover value judgements by animal rights groups ideologically opposed to a legal sport.

Sports journal 'Greyhound Racing News' also recently reported that the GBOTA is fully-committed to the development of the new track, despite the sport’s commercial body failing to guarantee its registration. When GBOTA first flagged the Orange project, the sports journal reported, the GRNSW had only committed to providing 52 race dates to the new track, on the condition that breeding numbers supported their implementation, not currently so.

Particularly in rural Australia, however, greyhound racing has traditionally offered an opportunity for working class families to participate as both owners and trainers in a way that was not possible for other animal racing sports, though it has for years been tainted by animal welfare concerns.

Cr Duffy said that, ultimately, such decisions as that by the WRPP supporting the proposal are bound by law, not the personal views of the sport by protest groups and advocates who, he believes, actually represent a minority of the population.

“It’s a legal sport… I’m a supporter of thoroughbred racing, rodeos, harness racing, and greyhounds and, as an industry, they’ve cleaned their sport up,” Cr Duffy said.

“They haven’t learnt their lesson, after Andrew Gee went to Canberra and there was a by-election here in 2016, people think it was due to the council amalgamation issue, but it was the greyhound banning that lost the seat for the Nationals,” he concluded.