ROBERT PIERCE

   • Leader & Times

The 2026 Five State Free Fair and Seward County PRCA Rodeo soon will be here, and the crew at the Seward County Fairgrounds spend all year preparing the grounds and buildings for those events and others.

Since last year’s fair and rodeo, Activity Center Director Linda Johnson said one major project has taken place in a shop at the fairgrounds.

“We worked on that wall,” she said. “We’ve got some cracks that have shown back up. We’re going to get those fixed, and we’ve been painting all the doors and all the windows that are like cinder blocks.”

Work is ongoing in the grandstands, and Johnson said crews still have some work left to do there.

“We haven’t figured out how we’re going to get those poles to work and fixing things,” she said. “Every day, there’s something else that shows up we’ve got to fix. We got the water truck given to us, so we’ve made do with it.”

Recently, Kai wall windows were replaced in the Activity Center, and Johnson said the results were excellent.

“We don’t have any more leaks in our ceiling in the meeting rooms,” she said.

As far as fairgrounds staff, Johnson said she is short one office worker, and cleaning and maintenance employee Mary Eastman helps out in that capacity.

Most of 2026 has been relatively dry in Seward County, but June did see some above average precipitation. This has increased the mowing for fairgrounds staff, but while they were behind there for some time, Johnson saying mowing is now getting caught up.

The next task for Johnson and her crew is taking care of ruts created by individuals driving into the fairgrounds.

Work too has been done in the rabbit and poultry barns, where Johnson said she and Eastman examined cages to see what repairs could be made there.

“We figured we could just flip that cage,” Johnson said. “When we got over there, there were three cages welded together, and they had wood on each end between them. They’d screwed them in, and they had washers and nuts on them and the smallest screws you’d ever seen.”

With crew members seeing how much work it would take to repair the cages, Johnson provided an alternative solution.

“I said flip it over, take your grinder wheel, grind it, cut it in two,” she said. “I told them to the saw and go through and cut that wood, and we’re good. We did it. We got it all done before the fair.”

Johnson’s husband, Larry, recently passed away, and he left a great amount of wood behind at the couple’s home in Liberal. Johnson said she and her crews utilize the wood for some of the fairground projects, saving money for other projects.

“I said let’s go see how much we can get out of there, and we didn’t have to buy so much material,” she said.

Though the county’s budget has been a source of problems for the past year, Johnson said the fairgrounds budget has not had much trouble, and she does not see much trouble for the upcoming fiscal year either.

“When we did our budget for this coming year, they haven’t looked at it yet,” she said. “I try to stay the same as I was last year and not add anything but what I have to. We didn’t know we had to have a music license, so that was something I had to add to the budget.”

Johnson said she did not ask for anything in her capital improvement plan for Fiscal Year 2027, and she tries to make do with what she has, with her biggest expense being at local hardware stores for small repairs.

Johnson said work is a continuous process at the fairgrounds.

“Every day’s a new story out here,” she said. “Something’s either broken, or somebody’s torn something up, and they never want to tell you about it.”

Johnson said when events do happen at the fairgrounds, staff already has knowledge of what is damaged at that point, and event planners are given a walk through and told they are responsible for any further damages to facilities.

“You will pay for it,” she said. “That comes out of your cleaning and damage deposit. They have to pay for what’s torn up and pay for the repairs on it. That saves us a whole lot for not having to charge the taxpayer for that. We check all the buildings on Monday morning to make sure there’s no damage to anything.”

It has been a couple of years since the most recent fee schedule was approved for the fairgrounds, and while scheduling events was hard at first, Johnson said it has gotten better since then.

“The following year, we’ve been full,” she said. “We’re still booking, and we had one call the other day wanting to book in 2028.”

County commissioners recently approved the use of part of the fairgrounds as an place for young people in town to keep their farm animals. Johnson said thus far, she is impressed with the in-town farm.

“These kids come out here with their parents,” she said. “We’d go out there once in a while, and we’d see them there. They’ll be bathing them and brushing them. Every day, they take them for a walk twice a day. They come in the morning and in the evening and walk their goats. It teaches the kids responsibility.”

With the fair just days away, Johnson said crews are getting close to having the fairgrounds ready for August’s biggest events, and work will continue through the fair itself. She said, though, work does ease somewhat during the rodeo.

“They come in to see if they can work the arena,” she said. “They start working at it. They’ll start doing some things over there, and they take a lot of that load off us. The fair is a different story because they don’t have a lot of help.”

Overtime has been an issue in some county departments, but Johnson said no such problems exist at the fairgrounds.

“We don’t do overtime,” she said. “We do comp time. We count their hours, and when they want off, they use their comp time. We don’t do overtime, and we don’t get much comp time. We try to get everything done by 5.”