Rendering for the Nebraska State Fair, Grand Island
Three years after moving from Lincoln to Grand Island, Neb., the Nebraska State Fair finally will be getting a new exhibition building that officials had hoped to construct with the fair’s initial move.
“This building that we’re going to construct within seven or eight months was supposed to be built when we first moved to Grand Island,” said Joseph McDermott, fair executive director.
Officials announced April 12 that construction will begin soon on the $5.4-million, 64,800-square-foot facility, featuring 54,000 square feet of exhibition space. The facility will be named the Nebraska Building. The capital will come from the fair’s own funds as well as bank loans, McDermott said.
Vendors including the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, Grow Nebraska, Nebraska Food Products and the Nebraska State Historical Society will move out of their current 100,000-square-foot – and crowded – exhibit building into the Nebraska Building, thereby creating about 23,000 square feet of space for new vendors.
And the fair needs the space, McDermott said.
“Ever since our first year here in Grand Island, we have had a waiting list of commercial exhibitors who want to be part of the fair,” McDermott said. “One of our primary exhibition buildings is roughly 100,000 square feet and that has been full every year.”
A 70,000-square-foot building for 4-H exhibits and other commercial vendors also is full, McDermott said.
For more than 100 years, the Nebraska State Fair was held in Lincoln on land adjacent to the University of Nebraska. In 2007, university officials decided they wanted to build a research park on the state-owned land used by the Nebraska State Fair. In April 2008, the Legislature decided to move the state fair from Nebraska to Grand Island to accommodate the university.
By August 2010, 550,000 square feet of exhibition space had been constructed at the new grounds in Grand Island, about 90 miles west of Lincoln. The first fair was held there in 2010 and drew about 309,000 attendees. Since then, those numbers have grown, to 333,000 in 2011 and 336,000 in 2012, the latter of which was more than had attended in Lincoln during its last decade there other than for the last fair in 2009.
“In 2009, we had 368,000 people,” McDermott said. “That was an increase that year of 58,000. A lot of those people came wanting to see the last fair. If you exclude 2009, the numbers have been better here than in Lincoln.”
When the fair moved, $42 million was spent to build exhibition space on 225 acres of space, about the same amount of land the fair had in Lincoln. Of that money, $5 million came from the state of Nebraska; $21.5 million came from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln; $7 million came from the city of Grand Island; and about $7-$8 million came from the Nebraska State Fair Board, McDermott said.
Even though the new facility was supposed to have been erected along with the others for the fair’s initial opening, waiting three years to begin construction on the Nebraska Building actually turned out to be a bit of good luck, McDermott said.
Initially, the plan was for the building to be 30,000 square feet, McDermott said. The one that will end up being constructed will be more than twice that size at 64,800 square feet, with 54,000 square feet of exhibition space on the ground floor and 10,800 square feet of office space on the upper level.
“We didn’t have enough time and money to build this last building so we put it on hold until we were able to generate some revenue to help pay for the building,” McDermott said. “So we paid down some of the debt and it gave us time to get a better feel for the grounds as well as the success of the fair here.”
Although the fair has about the same amount of acreage as at Lincoln, the event used some exhibition space provided by the University of Nebraska; therefore the new grounds does not provide the same amount of usable space.
The Nebraska Building also will house an exhibit that the fair had in Lincoln but that had not made the move to Grand Island, a Nebraska Games and Parks interactive educational display that primarily featured an aquarium stocked with native Nebraska fish and a shooting exhibition.
“Some of the space in this new building will be available to Games and Parks for those activities that they had in Lincoln,” McDermott said.
McDermott expects the building to be completed in January or February 2014 and to make its fair debut during the 2014 event. During the 2013 fair, which will be held Aug. 23-Sept. 2, McDermott does not anticipate the construction of the building to be a problem.
“We have an 8-acre area that we call the Family Fun Zone, with a lot of kids’ activities that take place,” he said. “This new building will be to the west of that, so it’s somewhat set apart from the rest of the grounds. We’ll just fence that area off. Construction will be taking place during the fair but it will be separated from the fair strictly due to its location.”
The 2013 fair will see another change. After Deltona, Fla.-based Belle City Amusements provided the carnival for the fair from 2009-2012, a change has been made to Spring Hill, Fla.-based Wade Shows, McDermott said.
After Belle City Amusement’s contract was up, McDermott said, “We talked to several different midways and selected the Wade Shows.”
Interviewed for this article: Joseph McDermott, (308) 382-1620.