A Banner Year!

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

After two years of going dark due to the COVID pandemic, the Clark County Fair roared back to life last week with an event for the record books.

The attendance number came in at 109,000 over the five-day event, according to Fair Executive Director Todd Robison. That destroys the previous attendance record of around 88,000 set in 2008.
“We were very pleased with how things went this year,” said Robison in an interview on Monday morning. “It was a great reset button for us to push and get going again. We couldn’t be more grateful.”

The weather was nearly perfect over the five days of the event. There was some wind on Wednesday. But after that, the winds largely went away and mild sunshine prevailed.
Robison said that the weather can play a vital part of what the attendance is at the Fair.

“Of course, you always plan for a bad day here and there,” Robison said. “You just hope that you don’t have multiple bad days, or even worse, lose a big day like Saturday. But this year we were pretty fortunate.”

But this year, the reaction to nearly two years of restrictions and quarantines played a part in attendance as well, Robison said.
“When you look at what people have gone through over the past couple of years,” Robison said. “They want to get out and live their lives. There is no doubt that there is a strong market for these kinds of events.”

Robison said that he was particularly impressed by the demeanor of the crowd. In years past, when the attendance was high at the fair, the emergency personnel have been kept busy with managing altercations between people, or emergency medical situations. This year, despite the numbers, there was none of that, Robison said.
“I was impressed with the patience people showed and the general good attitude among attendees,” Robison said. “It was not confrontational at all and everyone was very respectful.”

The PRCA Rodeo event was well attended. “We sold out the rodeo three nights in a row: Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” Robison said. “It was a phenomenal rodeo crowd this year!”

Robison said that the huge crowds, especially on the weekend, stretched the contracted service providers to the limits.
“Because we had been off for two years, we saw a high turnover this year on the service people that we do business with,” Robison said. “Some of them got pretty overwhelmed on Saturday.”

Robison specifically mentioned the janitorial services provider which by Saturday evening had become buried in the crowds.
“It wasn’t that they were inexperienced,” Robison said. “They do events like this in California all the time. But they weren’t prepared for this magnitude of crowd.”

Robison said that the owner of the janitorial contractor came to him apologetically early on Sunday feeling like they had let him down because volunteers had had to step in and help get things cleaned up the night before.
“I told them that we could have never known that it was going to be like this,” Robison said. “How could we expect them to understand how overwhelmed it would get?”

Robison said that most of the vendors did a brisk business at the fair. Much of the feedback he received from vendors was good. “They hammered it pretty good,” Robison said. “And they expected to do well. If the weather holds good, the people come. And they definitely came.”

Robison expressed sincere gratitude for the community support that this year’s fair received.
“I am just truly grateful to live in this community,” he said. “It just says a lot of the character of the people to give the most precious asset that they have, which is time, and support this community event. It is humbling.”

Robison said that it was a successful event this year. But he stopped short of saying that it was an overwhelming financial triumph for the overall budget.
“Some people say that the Fair just rakes in the bucks, but you have to look at it on the average,” Robison said. “It all averages in. We have had years where we have lost some hard dollars.”

The year 2020, when the fair had to be cancelled within a month before the event was one of those. “I don’t hide the fact that COVID really hurt us,” Robison said. “We lost something around $167,000 that month that we could never get back. So you really have to look at it year to year and see it as an average. Some years are good and other are not so good.”

But this year’s success has definitely put the fair back on its feet, Robison said. “We had good weather, great volunteers, the largest attendance ever,” he said. “There is no doubt that we will have another fair next year.”