County sticks with SCRAMP for Laguna Seca management.

If if feels like you've been around this racetrack before, it's with good reason: The Monterey County Board of Supervisors has decided to stick with the Sports Car Racing Association of the Monterey Peninsula (SCRAMP) as the manager of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca after courting other potential operators. 

Go back to two years ago on the eve of Car Week, and SCRAMP was on the defensive, talking up its virtues as Monterey County officials began the first round of talks with racing giant ISC, based in Daytona, Florida. 

That effort went nowhere, and cash-strapped nonprofit SCRAMP held on. But the county kept looking, and in the summer of 2016, SCRAMP and ISC submitted a joint proposal, in contention with Friends of Laguna Seca, an upstart nonprofit, and Long Beach-based World Automotive Championship of California. 

After all that, the County Board of Supervisors ended up signing another three-year management agreement with SCRAMP for 2017-2020. 

Fast-forward to the summer of 2017. The supervisors have again been in closed-session talks about whether to hand over Laguna Seca to Friends of Laguna Seca.

And on July 25, just a couple of weeks before Car Week 2017 begins, the supervisors announced their intention to keep their three-year agreement with SCRAMP in place, meaning the status quo—again—will hold. 

"We disagree with their decision, and we're disappointed," says Lauri Eberhart, general manager of Friends. "We had a really cooperative and coordinated plan, to work in conjunction with the county and SCRAMP to have a new business plan."

(SCRAMP, however, was not necessarily on board with its end of the cooperative agreement. “The county has been approaching this as if SCRAMP will be there no matter what,” Mike Smith, interim CEO of SCRAMP told the Weekly earlier this week. “Why would we want to keep doing this for free, for someone else? It just doesn’t make any sense.”)

Eberhart says Friends had pledged raising $50 million and investing all of that back into the track, which has costly deferred-maintenance needs. Of that, she adds, $10 million was promised "almost immediately."

"We're surprised," Eberhart says. "We felt we had a vey comprehensive plan for bringing Lagua Seca Raceway and the surrounding recreational area back to a world-class area."

As to what's next for the nonprofit, Eberhart says she doesn't yet know:

"We've got a vision, we've got a plan, we've got the access to capital—we'll see what happens." 

SCRAMP spokesperson Brad Littlefield says SCRAMP officials want to prove themselves before their existing three-year agreement ends, in hopes of getting a longer-term agreement after 2020. 

"We're happy to go along with business as we've been doing it without distraction," Littlefield says. 

"The feeling is, we're just going to do the best job we can."