For the state fair staff, Haines’ biggest party of the year is also their most hectic work week.
“Every year the fair has a million little fires that need to be put out” says fair director Amanda Randles. She says the fair was a success. Attendance was strong, the town was full, and the acts were good. ”So long as behind the scenes we are holding it all together with duct tape and prayer, what matters is what goes out to the public.”
For Randles, a shortage of volunteers is one of the biggest problems. Some of the rides had to be shut down for lack of an operator. The question for Randles is; which one? “Say we need ten volunteers for a full running midway. We have six. Which ride do we shut down? Which rides can we have one volunteer on, versus the ones that we have to have two on. For instance the slide. I have to have two volunteers on the slide, or I can’t have it open. Which rides are we more likely to get the best bang for our bucks? Like if we are going to have the bouncy castle open, it will be full the whole time, it always is. So that’s one that’s worth it to us to always have open.”
Randles says that as far as volunteers go, the fair might be a victim of its own success: “We are so successful, that everyone is working during the fair, which is great, look how busy Haines is, nobody can take the time off to go volunteer. I get it. Or, we hear this a lot: my whole family is coming to visit for the fair. Which is awesome, great, we are bringing all these people in, but nobody is free to come volunteer because they are entertaining.”
There were other glitches that had nothing to do with volunteers. Young fairgoers likely noticed the merry-go round was out of service.
“Unfortunately the carousel on day one decided to need a new bearing.” say Randles, ” And we just couldn’t really do anything about that right away but it will be back next year., with a new bearing.”
Randles says parts for the hundred year old contraption are impossible to come by. She says she will get it custom made. “There is a machinist in Whitehorse who we have worked with in the past, because of the carousel, because the carousel is a very specialty operation, I’m hoping to go to them and say ’hey, want to build us a new bearing?’ It’s an old enough machine, there is not really replacements, parts don’t exist anymore, and so when things need to be replaced we make them.”
Another noticeable absence was the sweater booth. Randles says this vendor ran into troubles, for the second year in a row. “Poor guy. Last year, he had his passport and wallet all stolen from him, and he was stuck in Peru. Because he goes out and buys things in these exotic locations that he brings back to us every year. This year he was driving up from Bellingham with his van, and blew the engine. And it was just too expensive to try and fix his van and get a UHaul. So he called the week of the fair saying ‘I’m stuck in BC.”
Randles says he will try coming next year.
Other hurdles during the fair included a malfunctioning ATM, key staff being sick, missing clipboards, volunteers not showing up for their shifts. Randles says it’s all par for the course. And she says some changes she implemented this year worked well. The fair increased it’s capacity to take card payments, for example. “This year we were able to have that point of sale system at the ride ticket booth, and at the beer gardens. Which means what used to be cash only sales, we were able to take cards> I believe, not having looked at the preliminary numbers, but having looked at volume, I think that may have been a big benefit.”
Randles found that not printing a program has been a good cost cutting measure. The glossy brochures used to be expensive. “And they are not really missed, there is perhaps one or two people a year that says ‘those were fun.”
She says the fair also cut on expenses by closing earlier. This helps take a load off volunteers. “And it sends people out to the businesses in the community, so they can benefit from the amount of people in town too. So it’s a win-win.
She says there is progress on the parking problems. “We’ve got to figure out a better parking situation. I think anyone who came here is well aware that we have outgrown the capacity of what we have, but we’ll work on that, we’ll figure it out. The borough started this year doing a shuttle from the school parking lot to here, and I think a big thing we could do is to publicize that a little bit more, because the parking lot is always a little overwhelming.”
Randles says the vendors handled their trash responsibly, so the bears were well behaved. “One of the things I love is if you walk around to all the food booths, almost every food booth door has a bear print on it. Because they will go through at night and check to see who’s door isn’t totally closed, and they go and push on each of those doors to make sure that each door is closed. And of course if they are not, the bear is like ’Woohoo, christmas time!’ but that never happened and we just have bear prints on the door of all the food booths, so it worked.”
Randles says she will have exact numbers next week on how much revenue the fair generated.She expects it to be slightly better than last year. She says finances are still tight after the pandemic year of no revenue, but things are going the right direction.
