As last-minute preparations came together for “the biggest little fair anywhere,” the Paso Robles City Council was deciding the fate of a seven-year-long negotiation with the California Mid-State Fair over Pioneer Park.
“This agreement in its current form—while it was great in 2015, it doesn’t pass the mustard in 2022, and we need to rescind this,” City Manager Ty Lewis said during the July 19 City Council meeting. “It doesn’t preclude the city and the fairgrounds to try to come to some other alternative arrangement.”
But the Mid-State Fair board—also known as the state’s 16th District Agricultural Association—feels otherwise about its agreement to purchase 5.6 acres of Pioneer Park.
Paso’s City Council approved the deal in November 2016, but the state agency that oversees real property acquisition has yet to sign off on it and recently requested changes to the terms. Mid-State Fair board President Krista Sabin and CEO Colleen Bojorquez said they had spoken with the state Department of General Services about its issues with the current agreement and believe they can be worked out without throwing the past seven years of work away.
Some of the issues include a lease agreement that would enable Paso’s youth teams to continue using the lighted baseball field until another one can be built or secured; language in a reversion clause, which would give the city the right to purchase the property back if the fair doesn’t use it for its intended purpose; and the state’s Surplus Land Act, which changed in 2019 and now requires “surplus land” to first be offered to affordable housing developers before it can be sold for another purpose. Paso could apply for the land to be exempted from the act, but if the state believes a sale is noncompliant, the city could be fined up to 30 percent of the purchase price—currently set at $800,000.
“While I understand the city’s frustration with the delay in process, because our board shares in that frustration, I have assurance from the General Services Department that the reversion issue and the Surplus Land Act issue can be resolved,” Sabin said during the July 19 hearing on whether to rescind city approval of the agreement. “The California Mid-State Fair and the event center is a treasure to our community and its significant impact to the local economy cannot be denied.”
Sabin said that the fair board was shocked when it received a letter from the city in March of this year putting an end date on the agreement, which hadn’t had a sunset date.
“When the city and the fair came together to negotiate the terms of that agreement, it was done in good faith and with the best interest of our city and the fair in mind,” Sabin said. “This close-by-June-30 or we have no deal, that was quite an arbitrary deadline, and one that actually felt like a real betrayal of the valued partnership and relationship that we have with the city.”
She added that Pioneer Park is a key element to the success of the Paso Robles Event Center, the Mid-State Fair, and plans to expand both in the future. Without use of Pioneer Park, which the fair currently leases from the city for parking, “the fair as we currently know it and our large interim events would not be possible,” Sabin said.
“We do not see this acquisition as one of convenience, we see it as an acquisition of absolute necessity,” she added. “We simply do not have the space to continue to provide the events that we currently do without this property … without that property, those events can’t grow.”
And growth is a major component of the event center’s future. Plans called for expanding and reorienting the grandstand arena and a full demolition and remodel of one of the livestock buildings, according to a staff report. Pioneer Park would help by providing additional areas for staging and other operations that would otherwise have to fit the current footprint.
Without that growth, some of the big events hosted in Paso might have to look for other venues, Sabin said, which would mean a revenue loss for the city and its businesses.
Several Paso residents told the City Council that they were worried that the Mid-State Fair would have to move to another city if it wasn’t able to purchase Pioneer Park.
SLO County 1st District Supervisor John Peschong, who spoke during public comment on the issue, said that the council should reconsider rescinding the agreement and move forward with trying to close the deal.
“This has been negotiated for quite a long time, but it is the state,” Peschong said. “We take a long time to get things done. I do think they’re moving in the right direction. And I think the state is going in the right direction.”
He added that the fair is the No. 1 economic driver for Paso: “Do anything you can to make sure you continue this agreement.”
City Council members said they didn’t feel comfortable pulling out of the agreement without having a better idea of what the state might want in a different agreement or whether some of the issues in the current agreement could be resolved. Ultimately, the board continued the item until the first meeting in November to give city staff, the fair board, and the state some more time to discuss the issues.
“It costs us nothing to continue this item, and it may resolve the problem,” Councilmember Steve Gregory said. Δ
This article appears in 55 Fiction 2022.