County Fair Officials Say Goodbye to Sacred Cows

You will still find your mutant zucchinis and corn-fed heifers, the yodeling cowboys and one-man washboard bands.

But after more than 100 years, California’s county fairs have reached a crossroads. As this evergreen of summertime approaches, organizers in the industry are contending with an identity crisis.

Tractor pulls will compete with Harley-Davidson motorcycle rallies, and exposition halls will showcase circuit boards and digital technology.

“There are lots of emotional aspects of the fair industry, and you have to tap into those powerful memories,” says Los Angeles County Fair Assn. President James E. Henwood Jr. “But you also have to make a present-day connection to what the customer wants.”

In a state whose farming income leads the nation, the fair industry finds itself generating more revenue while attracting a smaller audience, as the increasingly immigrant populace grows less familiar with the Midwestern tradition.

How does the fair keep its country heritage of livestock and harvest--the very identity that has drawn people for generations--while providing enough razzmatazz to compete with theme parks and shopping malls, many of which have eagerly appropriated key elements of the traditional fair?

“We’re right in the center of a sophisticated county where [potential fair-goers] have their pick of Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and countless other attractions,” said Becky Bailey-Findley, general manager of the Orange County Fair, which opens Friday. “But we can’t pretend to have the money to be Disneyland, and our patrons really don’t want us to be.”

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So when the state fair opens in August in Sacramento, the lineup will include an Elvis Fest, Hispanic Culture Day and a special night when singles can mingle as they ogle contestants in the annual Golden Bear Bodybuilding Contest.

And some of the hog calling at the fair in Costa Mesa will involve the mechanical kind--Harley-Davidsons and their owners who have been invited to drive onto the fairgrounds to take part in a motorcycle rodeo.

“We have to decide what works [and] what isn’t working,” said Stephen Chambers, executive director of the Sacramento-based Western Fair Assn., which will meet this winter in Anaheim. “What exactly is our mission?”

Such talk worries traditionalists who fear that indiscriminate mixing and matching of yesterday and today will destroy the delicate fabric of the hallowed institution.

But agents of change argue that the fair must remain relevant. They say the next generation of customers will be lost if organizers fail to lure young urban and suburban families.

As with any industry in the throes of change, there is growing concern that fairs could reinvent themselves out of business.

“Some fairs are going to realize that as they try to be more efficient, they’ve moved into a fundamentally different product,” cautioned Michael O’Hare, a UC Berkeley public policy professor who is studying the fair industry.

Despite the challenges, fair operators say they don’t have to mimic Disneyland to survive.

“Theme parks drive us up the ladder in terms of how much better we can present things,” Chambers said. “But theme parks are there to present fantasy, and fairs are here to celebrate the accomplishments of ordinary people. We have decidedly different roles.”

The annual summer fair has a rich agricultural heritage that extends back to pre-Revolutionary War days, when landowners gathered to learn about agricultural advances in Europe.

During the 1950s, Louis Merrill, a longtime industry executive from Sacramento, responded to increased competition from shopping malls and theme parks by giving serious thought to trying to license the word “fair.”

But it’s almost impossible to define a ritual that’s as much a social phenomenon as it is an exposition. Even the thought of it scares some observers.

“It would be a tragedy if the state decided it had to have a legal description on what a fair is, and that everyone had to check off the checklist,” O’Hare said.

Fairs are a big business in California. They generate about $1.8 billion in revenues annually and pump an estimated $170 million into state coffers.

(Of the 80 California fairs, 54 are set up as state agencies, with annual budgets and board members appointed by the governor. Twenty-four more are county fairs, private nonprofit organizations that typically have no connection to county government other than contracts that allow them to use county land and use the county name. These organizations aren’t entirely self-sufficient, however: They receive an annual stipend from state tax on parimutuel betting. The remaining two fairs are unaffiliated citrus events.)

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The Los Angeles County Fair has long been the nation’s largest county fair, according to Amusement Business, a trade magazine. The Del Mar and Orange County fairs are among the 35 largest, and the state fair in Sacramento is usually among the continent’s 20 largest.

But California’s changing social and economic structure is prompting fairs to study their past and plot new strategies for the future.

Chambers, paraphrasing management guru Peter Drucker, notes that fairs are among the businesses approaching the 21st century with an operating model designed in the 19th century.

The time warp is obvious in the exposition halls, where animal pens are designed for exhibitors rather than paying customers.

Henwood, who previously served as general manager of the South Coast Plaza shopping mall in Costa Mesa, is urging fairs to incorporate modern marketing principles: “Maybe the fair industry has been showing the [wrong] end of the cow for too long.”

The industry is awash in innovative ways to fulfill the state’s mandate to teach the public about agriculture. Some fairs distribute agricultural textbooks to students through school systems or at malls. The Orange County Fair operates a year-round farm that gives visitors a glimpse into a way of life that’s all but gone in their increasingly crowded area. To teach city slickers about bees, the fair hired a clarinet player who combined education and spectacle by coating himself with 200,000 bees.

The current upheaval in the fair industry began in 1991. The state, which has helped finance fairs for more than a century, slashed support for fairs as a way of dealing with its budget crisis. The culture shock continued in 1993 when a report authorized by the Division of Fairs and Expositions suggested that fairs try to become more entrepreneurial.

“We weren’t trying to ‘micro-manage’ fairs,” said Cornelius Gallagher, a Bank of America executive in Sacramento who chaired the committee. “But the management of fairs needs to move toward a more businesslike way of managing. . . . They’ve got to think like a business.”

But with state funding eroding, some operators fear that more fairs will follow in the footsteps of the Santa Clara County Fair, which has been in bankruptcy proceedings since early 1994.

“If the numbers don’t work, the rest of it doesn’t matter,” said Lewis Ridgeway, a Sacramento-based financial consultant. “No matter how much you want to put on a fair, no matter what your philosophy of a fair is, if you spend more than you take in, you’re going to go out of business.”

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Some fairs are larger than most of the state’s for-profit companies.

The Orange County Fair has 55 full-time state employees and an army of part-time workers that swells to 1,200 during the fair. The L.A. County Fair has an $11-million payroll that includes 250 full-time employees and as many as 3,200 part-time workers.

That’s a stark contrast to the old days, Ridgeway said, “when you rented a field from a farmer, threw up the tents and had a fair.”

“Now you have a fixed facility and a full-time staff,” Ridgeway said. “And that’s what’s killing fairs. You put on the fair for two weeks, but you have to maintain the facility year-round.”

State-owned fairgrounds cover an estimated 10 square miles of diverse California geography and house $1 billion in aging barns, exposition halls and support buildings. Few fairs have the capital needed to renovate their assets.

Fairs are the premier product of successful fairgrounds. But operators know they must keep their grounds busy all year.

The massive Fairplex in Pomona generates more than half its $40 million in revenue from non-fair operations, including swap meets, drag-racing and a luxury hotel built a decade ago.

The Marin County Fair solidified business relationships with home-grown technological wizards by erecting an 8,000-square-foot hall that pays homage to technological wizards such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

And the Napa Town and Country Fair is considering a venture with vintner Robert Mondavi, who wants to link a multimillion-dollar exposition center with the fairgrounds sitting across the Napa River.

Operators also are wrestling with a challenge from Gov. Pete Wilson, who’s urging them to reinvent themselves after more than a century of state control. The move to privatize parts of the state-owned industry has prompted a firestorm of protest from unions representing state employees at fairgrounds.

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Talk of reinvention prompts some fair managers to grumble, said Deanna Marquart, a Sacramento-based public policy analyst who helped write a 1993 report titled “California Fairs Facing Change.”

“They think it’s superfluous conversation,” Marquart said. “And they just don’t want to hear about it.”

It’s also possible, observers say, that ordering a fair to reinvent itself is akin to telling a circle to become a square. How, they ask, do you turn what’s at heart a social event into a business?

“I’d caution fairs against using profitability as a measure of success,” O’Hare said. “Because one thing a fair is supposed to do is spend public funds in a way that brings great benefits to the public.”

As fairs craft strategic alliances and cut sponsorship deals with breweries, banks, newspapers and grocery chains, O’Hare worries that fairs will lose their essence.

“You might have to sell your soul a little bit to stay alive financially,” O’Hare said. But “does it mean the fair would be even better if we brought in professional jams and pies, perhaps a contest among Entenmann’s, Smuckers, Kraft and Hostess?”

Henwood argues that fairs no longer have the luxury of pretending that sound business practices no longer matter.

“Whatever the activity is when we open the gate on Monday morning, it’s got to be strong enough to attract paying customers,” Henwood said. “And you just can’t run the same model of fair year after year and expect it to work.”

Times correspondent Melinda Fulmer in Orange County contributed to this report.