While there have been challenges, learning on the job through his first fair has Park County Events Coordinator Billy Wood feeling a lot better in the home stretch of preparing for his second county fair.

“This year is great,” he said. “It helps we have a really good staff. It’s a job but this year, shoot we've already got judges, sponsors.”

Wood said while there’s not a fair manager degree, per se, he’s been taking classes as well, which led him to revamp and redesign the fair book, along with finding a new way to divvy up the fair book online. While it’s once again not being printed for free distribution to save costs, it’s available for free as a PDF at parkcountyeventsandfair.com and for sale at White Ink Printers. People can also pick up individual sections of the fair book at the office.

While overall the process has been a lot smoother, Wood said, some of the changes this year have caused headaches. He said the staff and fair board decided to open up ticket sales in June as opposed to waiting until July, but that hasn’t really paid off as he said as of July 6 they’d only sold around 500 event tickets — the stadium fits 1,800 people and there are five nights of events. Wood said the thought was to give people, especially families,  more time to budget for a fair outing as a family of four going to eat, ride some rides and watch a grandstand show can quickly spend a good amount of money.

“I get that it gets spendy but if we're gonna put these events on we got to be able to cover ourselves with all the costs,” he said, noting on July 6 that just since the start of the month they’d given out checks totaling six figures for various costs.

A nice surplus of revenue from last year’s fair has helped cover many of the early costs. Last year the event cleared $342,968 in revenue with just over $234,000 in expenses.

A fair comes with a lot of expenses, from hotel rooms and travel for judges, costs for the free acts and grandstand events, and this year the cost of building a pen to house the pigs to be used for pig wrestling.

Another challenge in putting on the fair, Wood said, has been in securing enough staff for the event. However he said July 6 that earlier that morning he had secured his security staff, leaving the biggest openings left in the gate attendants, although he’s optimistic.

“I’m sure we’ll be just fine,” he said.

Long-term staff and volunteers, however, have been his biggest asset. Events assistant Karl Johnston noted some who have been handling events, since before he started attending the fair himself.

Overall, Wood is optimistic as he moves into the home stretch of the event, which he said at a meeting with the fair advisory board and county commissioners, is “50 weeks of work for two weeks of events.”