It's been a while since I last wrote to you, but I was inspired by your short piece on the Fairgrounds. I appreciate Mayor Marty's suggestions for how to re-capitalize the facilities of Expo New Mexico, but I respectfully disagree with the idea of simply selling the grounds and moving Expo to "the west side" or elsewhere. We need to think in a different strategic direction. Plans for the Fair and the Fairgrounds have come and gone over the years. Today, let's ask, what could the New Mexico State Fair of the 21st Century become? First, a bit of history: Expo New Mexico is the name of the Fairgrounds adopted by the State Fair Commission at the recommendation of the general manager, the late Michael Cerletti. The property is only about 236 acres, or approximately 10 million square feet of land with hundreds of thousands of square feet of roofed facilities and paved streets and parking lots representing over $300M of public infrastructure. Tingley Coliseum and the Downs at Albuquerque are just the best known parts of the Fairgrounds. One master plan for the Fairgrounds in the 1970s recommended buying the land south of Central Avenue to build a hotel and other related facilities along with more parking. Another informal plan I proposed back in the 1990s to help revitalize Central Avenue was to relocate Fair time Main Street shops and restaurants to Central Avenue, "New Mexico's Main Street" and operate them year-round. The State Fair is still the largest business enterprise in the International District of Albuquerque with revenues and expenditures of around $20M per year. A key point that Marty and many others miss is that Expo New Mexico is actually in operation every week of the year except for Christmas and New Years. Expo hosts events including art fairs, art shows, equestrian events and dog agility competitions, not to mention private gambling and horse racing, monster truck shows and professional wrestling. The New Mexico Arts and Crafts Fair which has been at the Fairgrounds for decades explicitly said that they would simply close if the Fairgrounds move out of town. Now, we have a spanking new Racino which cost the owners millions of dollars to build, along with a new multi-year lease to use the grounds, the racetrack and the horse barns. That ain't going to move anytime soon. Back around 2006, the administration of Expo under Fred Peralta and the State Fair Commission of the time hired a nationally-recognized consultant on fairs and exposition facilities and appointed a committee of very talented folks and hosted several public meetings to discuss and review the future of the Fairgrounds and the potential to actually move the Fair to another site, maybe another county. New competing exhibition and entertainment facilities were being built across the region, particularly around the Pueblo casinos, like Route 66, Isleta and Sandia. The Santa Ana Star Center is another competitor to Tingley and other facilities at Expo. Another challenge at the time was the potential loss of the racetrack and the casino and $2M+ in annual lease revenue. Luckily that didn't happened. The consensus was that there would never be the $300+ million needed to just reconstruct the existing Expo facilities on a new site - not including the new Racino built there more recently - and these would not be "world class" facilities by any measure. And certainly not competitive with the new facilities in Tulsa and Oklahoma City where the Arabian Horse show went. The west mesa was particularly disliked by the horsemen because of the exposed landscape out there and the frequent winds they experience. The undeveloped Heights around Louisiana

Boulevard of the 1930s may have had similar weather conditions, but I doubt it. The potential performance of a new remote site on the far West Mesa could be compared to the experience of operating the Star Center in Rio Rancho which has struggled to stay open. We looked at the cost to move and rebuild versus the current value of the land which real estate appraisers said was around $3 per square foot before the "great stagnation, as you put it - were the land to be zoned and built out similarly to the neighborhoods around it. The numbers just won't work if the land were just sold to developers in today's market. However, if the property were dramatically up-zoned to much higher density. mixed-use residential and commercial uses of the land, more intense than Uptown today, the sale and revenue from a special assessment district might generate enough additional property tax revenue to make the numbers work, but no one every proved that. The new Fair would need at least ten times the cash from the sale alone. AND, those numbers did not even include the cost of new land and necessary off-site infrastructure improvements. Along with any changes proposed for the Fair and the Fairgrounds, there is still the ongoing need for approximately $3 to $6M in capital maintenance every year just to keep the facilities of that size working safely and reliably. Money that Expo has never been able to generate by itself and the legislature and governor have not been willing to sustainably provide. One option would be to create a private non-profit "Friends of the Fair" foundation to try to build a private endowment to help.

If the racetrack closed, the consultants recommended a plan to build a grand esplanade from Louisiana into the Fairgrounds and to extend Main Street (Avenue of the Governors) south to Central and north through the current Horse Arena all the way to Lomas. A new hotel and convention facility could be built along the esplanade to replace the old, no longer needed racing horse barns - but that would compete with the City's downtown facilities. Whatever opportunity there might have been 10 years ago has passed. In the plan, old buildings would also be re-built and updated. Other improvements might include a new state police emergency fire and police command center and fire station that would also serve the Fair itself along with a new science and technology exhibit building sponsored perhaps by Intel and Sandia and Los Alamos Labs. New large digital billboard displays could be installed on Main Street. New solar panels could be added to existing roofs and a couple of wind turbines could be erected in the parking lots to demonstrate wind power. But these improvements would cost hundreds of millions to achieve. The New Mexico State Fair is an "urban" fair, compared to a "rural" fair, like Colorado's which is held in Pueblo. One advantage of an urban fair is that it brings rural, agricultural New Mexico to city and suburban residents, especially children who may never see a live chicken, pig, goat or cow otherwise. The Dairy Barn is always a popular attraction during the Fair with live milking demonstrations (and fresh ice cream and milkshakes) along with the perennial Sheep to Shawl exhibit. Attendance at rural fairs is relatively much lower, and there are fewer potential uses like art fairs and other city celebrations, so those facilities sit idle more of the year. Less is simply less, and that is not what the State Fair Commission heard the people ask for. They wanted to see the existing fairgrounds improved and beautified. The public want a multi-purpose, regionally competitive exposition complex that they can be proud of.

John Hooker, AIAformer Director of Strategic Planning and Capital Projectsfor Expo New Mexico and the New Mexico State Fair