Oregon Fairs warning
Published February 18th, 2007
Across Oregon, the debate over what to do with aging fairgrounds can cause clashes between the fair boards that run them and the county commissioners who ultimately oversee these public assets.
But rarely does such a clash end as dramatically as the one in Lane County in January: The commissioners voted not to fill two seats on the five-person volunteer fair board, prompting the three remaining fair board members to quit and leaving Lane County without a fair board for the first time in memory.
The fair and county boards were at odds over the future of the fairgrounds - called the Lane Events Center - a graying complex that lacks the money for a makeover.
Publicly owned fairs around the state and the country face the same predicament, officials say: decaying buildings, no money for major improvements and no consensus on what to do about it.
Warren Wong, managing director of the 55-acre Lane County fairgrounds, said there’s no mystery to the money problem. He’s hemmed in by steep operating expenses driven in part by high employee costs for public-sector benefits, and the need to keep fees for rentals and activities low enough to draw the general public - including events for which the fairgrounds charges little or nothing at all.
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