“It's been a great facility. We've had a lot of memories, and it has treated us very well. But we've used up our new car now,” Meader said Friday. “Just cruise out here and look at the horse barns. You can kind of see where we didn't change the oil, didn't change the tires. We just drove that bad dog.”
The county says it can't afford to pay for the tuneups, and the grounds are unable to pay for themselves.
will take to the public in the next
12 months.
“We've tweaked the process some and I think really did a better job of defining the problem,” said Dale Bickell, the county's new chief administrative officer. “We needed to talk about getting to the root of the problem.”
Commissioners on Thursday gave preliminary approval to a process that poses the question: “How should Missoula County reconstitute the fair so it is financially sustainable, appeals to a broader segment of Missoula's population, and retains its agricultural heritage and traditions?”
Bickell said the emphasis on financial sustainability came about from concerns that “if we do the process without fixing the financial part, we'll be back in five years and say, ‘Whoops, we built these facilities but we can't afford to maintain them.' ”
The county has toyed with a variety of approaches to fair and fairgrounds planning since the long-standing fair commission was disbanded a few weeks after the 2007 fair. An early proposal for two separate processes, one for the fairgrounds, the other for the future of the six-day fair, was modified later.
Ann Mary Dussault, Bickell's predecessor as CAO, guided the planning until her retirement June 30. Bickell said her fingerprints are on the new plan.
This one, he added, is “a little more fair-centric.”
“Really this is a process not about that particular site, or what should be there or what shouldn't be there. It's about how the fair should be,” Bickell said. “Is the current fair event what we want, and how should it maybe be changed, and how do we make it financially sustainable over time?”
No contract has been signed, but Bickell called Crandall Arambula the “potential consultant” for the process. The Portland, Ore.-based planning firm will likely move on to the county's business after it finishes with the city's downtown master plan in September or October.
The general public will become involved with fair planning some time after that, though there may be some sort of outreach to fairgoers at the Western Montana Fair in August.
Commissioners are expected to give a final go-ahead next week to put a new emergency operations center on the November ballot. An information campaign will demand staff resources.
Fair planning “may be naturally delayed a little bit that way, too,” Bickell said. “It'll take probably a year from the time we get started later in July. Probably by next July we'll have it essentially wrapped up.”
The recommended process that commissioners studied at an administrative meeting Thursday offered a “null alternative” - what happens if no action is taken on behalf of the fair.
“The property would continue to deteriorate; the historic structures, the community space of the fair, the sense of living history, and the connection between rural and urban living would be jeopardized,” a summary said.
What's more, decaying facilities would compromise public safety, and the county's ability to provide disability access would be limited.
The management team has identified interests that could be affected by the process, breaking them into eight categories: current fair users, business interests, neighbors, government agencies, fairgrounds facility users, potential users and uses, media and “high interest” groups such as horse racing advocates, historic preservation groups and the former fair commission.
The team is identifying key constituents from that group and will begin meeting with them “hopefully sooner than later,” Bickell said.
Meanwhile, efforts are under way to inventory the fairgrounds for their historic significance.
“That's what's great about the fair. It's really living history,” Bickell said. “I think that needs to be maintained.”
Crandall Arambula's responsibilities will include reviewing background information of the fair and previous fair plans, including one conducted by the fair board that commissioners panned last summer.
The planners will meet with stakeholders and develop a list of facilities and site needs for the fair, develop “programming alternatives,” and design site alternatives and potential redevelopment options.
Ultimately a “preferred fair program option” that includes facilities and location will be presented to the commissioners.
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