ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
The Five State Fair Association is looking for a few good board members, and Saturday, the two lone current board members took a step in finding those members.
About 28 local people attended a membership event hosted by the fair association to help recruit a new board, and current board member Mary Rose said several of those in attendance appear to be interested in helping the cause.
At the event, Rose talked about five key elements of the Five State Fair, the first being the association itself and its purpose.
“We talked about funding,” she said. “Where do we get the money? Where does it go? How much money does it cost to put on the fair? We talked about a breakdown of all of that and how much it cost last year to have the fair.”
Likewise, Rose talked about a contract dated 2016 the association drew up with the Seward County Commission that mentioned why the fair has been moved up one full week in August, why the carnival is currently not a part of the fair and the importance of protecting agriculture in the county.
As far as the contract with the commission, Rose said previous boards have discussed having it revised.
“It’s going on 10 years old,” she said. “That is something the board that’s being formed needs to look at.”
The current board consists of Rose and Mike Amerin, and with a full fair board consisting of 11 members, five of those members are appointed by the county commission, with the remaining six being appointed by the association. Rose said she and Amerin are coordinating with the county commission and those who applied for membership.
“When they applied, some of them wanted to apply for the three-year, but they did it online,” she said. “That was only for the one-year. We’ll make some phone calls and verify what years they want to do, and we’ll sit down with the commission and form the board from the applicants who applied. Some are wanting three-year, and they applied for the one-year. There wasn’t a tab that said what year you wanted to apply for.”
Rose said she was pleased with Saturday’s turnout, and she added nine people applied at the event and six who had committed to apply online after the event.
“We’ve had a total of 15 possible applicants apply,” she said. “We only need 11 on the board, so we’re only looking for nine applicants. With what we got in, we’re able to make a board from that as long as they all accept and agree to go.”
Even if a full board is put in place, though, Rose said people will still be sought to help with the fair.
“We’re never going to stop looking for people to help out,” she said. “We’re still going to need people to help out with open class stuff, gates, ribbons or information. We never stop looking for that little bit of help or volunteerism or the reach out part of the sponsorship. That’s never going to stop.”
As far as funding for the Five State Fair is concerned, Rose said she has applied for the last two years for a grant through Dillons from the Kroeger Foundation.
“It’s long,” she said. “It takes quite a while. There’s a lot of data you have to compile in order to fill that out. They usually try to do that four or five months prior to the fair. If you get that grant, there’s several ways they’ll help you out. One is a gift card for merchandise. One is other merchandise they’ll send you. We’ve been honored to do that.”
Part of the Dillons grant focuses on how an event such as the Five State Fair affects a community, and Rose said the money received from the grant is quite impactful to the fair.
“Using some of that gift card, we do partner with National Beef and Dillons, and they help support Kids Day, Family Day,” she said.
The fair has been approved for the last two years for the Dillons grant, and Rose said the application process is quite extensive.
“There’s so much you have to include that, and those who have wrote grants probably know how much work goes into those – a lot of data, a lot of statistics, researching that, putting in numbers and figures from the previous fairs and how impactful is it to the community,” she said. “Luckily, we’ve been fortunate to get that from Kroeger.”
Rose said she has not personally looked into other grants, but she did say the county commission did hire a group to handle grants.
“There was some talk about getting some grants for the fairgrounds to preserve the rock wall and some buildings out there,” she said. “I had put in my recommendation for them to find a grant for a building out there that is rock and try to get that redone with possibly a historical grant.”
While that grant was a recommendation, Rose said she is unsure if it has come to fruition yet.
“They did ask what we thought about where any grants needed to be looked at,” she said. “That was one of them I did send over to them. I haven’t looked at any other grants for the fair except for the commission looking for that grant for some of the stuff at the fairgrounds.”
Rose did say she was quite surprised by the turnout at Saturday’s event.
“We usually have meetings like that in October, and we don’t have a very big turnout,” she said. “At that time, we usually do dinners, so this year, I thought it would be easier to do cookies and tea and little finger foods. To have 28 people show up was good. You can never gauge how many people are going to show up to an event, especially in the weekend in the mid-afternoon. For 28 people to show up and to get people signed up to be on the board, definitely, the goal was achieved.”
So where does the fair association go forward after the membership event? Rose said phone calls were first scheduled to be made this week to people who applied for the fair board to verify if they wanted the three-year or one-year terms.
“I’ll touch base with the people who were going to do their applications online and make sure they get those in and make an appointment for the commission, so possibly on the 18th, we’ll have a board formed,” she said.
Rose said after forming the board and formalizing dates for this year’s Five State Fair, an immediate priority is getting the fair book out. Likewise, the board will need to choose its officers, including president, vice president, secretary and treasurer.
“We have to assign leadership roles, banking information,” she said. “With that, the first thing we need to do getting out of the gate is formally acknowledged when the dates of the fair are and verify the book and send that off to the people who were at the meeting.”
Youth often do projects in school, and Rose said they need to know they can submit those to the Five State Fair, which is something some parents requested from the fair board.
“Timing is everything,” she said. “If you have somebody who is doing something in a school, it’s important for them to be able to enter that into the fair. Having that fair book out to say I have seven months to work on my paper mache project or my ceramics, they know the rules and regulations for that in the fair book.”
After a board is formed, Rose said committees will form, and brainstorming will take place for this year’s fair.
“We might have to have more than one meeting in the month, and that’s something the board will have to discuss,” she said. “We’re a few months behind in planning the fair. Moving forward from that, I can’t sit here and say this is what we’re going to do. The association has to have all our minds together. It’s not a one-person board. We need to get the committees going and brainstorm what we want to do.”
With good news coming from Saturday’s event, Rose said she is quite optimistic about this year’s Five State Fair.
“We’ve got step one down,” she said. “We’ve got people ready to go. In this day and age, it’s hard to find board members, and for people to come out and say they want to help, it’s big. Some people say, ‘I don’t want to be on the board, but I want to come and help.’ That says a lot too. I’m happy we were able to move forward and achieve the goal of getting the membership drive and building those bridges. We have really good people who are willing to come on, and they have been very instrumental in the community.”
Rose said with the membership event complete, she and Amerin are moving forward, and that is an important piece to the puzzle that makes up the fair.
“With that success and moving forward with this fair, it’s just going to get better,” she said. “Keep marching. Put one foot in front of the other, and we’ll succeed in keeping it.”
