As the
Clark County Fair starts Friday, July 23, at the fairgrounds at Champions Park, it kicks off a week full of agricultural sales and competitions, 4-H education and recognition, rides and games, food and entertainment.
The fair typically brings about 80,000 people together during fair week, and there’s hopes that attendance won’t fall too far below that as the fair returns to it’s full form following a limited version in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But after the rides shut down, the animals and booths are packed up and families return home when the fair ends, the fairgrounds and Champions Park as a whole doesn’t sit silent until the fair ramps up the following year.
In 2020, plans were announced for
updates to be made to the entry into Champions Park, which includes a more open, welcoming entrance and space for a hotel, retail vendors and restaurants.
“The big picture is, we know that that's a great location at Interstate 70 and State route 41 to become a signature gateway into Springfield and Clark County,”
Clark County Commissioner Melanie Wilt says. “We want to be clear to the community and those coming to visit our community that agriculture is incredibly important to us. And this is a placed where we showcase agriculture, but it’s also has a lot of adaptable features for other uses. That location is our No. 1 tourism driver in Clark County.”
Though not much has changed visually since the plans were announced last year, Wilt says a Marriott band hotel will be developed, and the other retail and/or restaurant establishments are expected to be chosen sometime after the hotel build begins, She doesn’t anticipate ground breaking on the hotel site until sometime in 2022.
Wilt also says the county already has turned down an offer for a larger gas station concept, and says the goal is to focus on attracting a mix of retail and restaurants – both sit-down and fast food.
“Mostly, we’re focusing on rebranding the entry. We want it to feel more like Disney and less gated when you drive in,” says Dean Blair, executive director of the
Clark County Fairgrounds.
Blair offered an example of one of the many events hosted at Champions Park – a wine festival that takes place in the spring.
When Blair reached out to organizers years ago about possibly hosting the event at the fairgrounds, they turned him down because they felt that a fairgrounds wasn’t a setting that would best fit their event. When he reached back out a few years later and offered to host the wine festival at Champions Park event venue, organizers were willing to come see what the Clark County space had to offer.
After seeing the versatility for themselves, the wine festival organizers signed on, and this year marked their third annual event at Champions Park.
“It’s a very convertible space, and our fair director and fair board over the last several decades have really been forward-thinking in how they maintained the facility,” Wilt says.
Throughout the year – in addition to the fair and the wine festival – the venue hosts weddings, banquets, gun shows, and building supply auctions. There are nine antique shows throughout the year, including two antique extravaganzas, and four cars and parts swap meets.
Champions Park also hosts five motorcycle shows and swaps, local and national animal shows, numerous high school and collegiate cross country events, and a variety of boating races – including the recent MRC nationals and the upcoming Wake the Lake weekend.
In the past,
Mercy Health has hosted it’s annual gala at Champions Park, and this year, a private promoter has planned the first-ever concert at the venue, featuring a variety of country artists.
And all of that doesn’t include the year round list of equine and livestock events that take place at the Champions Center at Champions Park.
“We will always be the Historic Clark County Fairgrounds,” Blair says. “But, we’ve just transitioned to be Champions Park – home of the Historic Clark County Fairgrounds, home of
Champions Park Lake, home of the
Champions Center, home of the
Champions Park Cross County Course. It shows how much we have to offer both locally and for visitors.”
To explain the types of crowds drawn to the venue outside of fair week, Blair explained that during the MRC boating competitions earlier this month, more than 500 people came to a nightly dinner in the Mercantile Building, which was catered by a different local catering company each night.
There were almost 20 campers on the fairgrounds, many of which Blair says he learned were rented from local owners through an Airbnb type of service for campers. And the other week-long guests stayed at hotels throughout Springfield.
“There’s a big business going on in that way and a lot of commerce is going on here locally because we’re able to bring people here for these kinds of event,” Blair says.
While Blair is still thankful to see big crowds for the fair – including to see this year’s special sea lion exhibit, a Marshall tractor, and free musical entertainment that’s included with admission fees – he is also appreciative that the multi-use space within Champions Park allows the facility to bring in sources of revenue year-round.
And Wilt agrees.
“What it means to us at the county is that we can maintain the property as a sustainable fairgrounds for the next 100 years at least. The new development allows us to protect that, and gives us some funds to make the fairgrounds even more viable,” she says.
However, Wilt says it’s just as important to ensure the growth continues to be purposeful.
“Oftentimes, we have a rural mindset where we don’t want a lot of people where we have agricultural space,” she says. “In order to do that, we need to proactively create opportunities for development that are strategic that contribute back to protecting agriculture and our rural way of life.
“The development (coming to Champions Park), supports our biggest agricultural showcase, and it supports the idea that development would move past that area and back toward Springfield – not into farmland.”
Wilt says there are no plans for any further development within the fairgrounds itself, and there is a proposed 50-year agreement between the
Clark County Agricultural Society and the Fairgrounds to ensure the fairgrounds maintains its main purpose moving forward.
She also emphasized the importance of continuing to grow tourism to take some of the tax burden used to maintain infrastructure off of local residents.
“It’s extremely important because we don’t want all our infrastructure to be the burden of all the people who live here. By attracting tourists and overnight guests, we attract a base to contribute to our sales tax because when they’re here they’re eating food and using services that support us locally,” Wilt says.