With less than a month to go before the 100th Annual Westlock & District Ag Fair, there’s still a lot of work to do to get the grandstands ready for the crowd.
After several delays, a work bee is scheduled for today, July 15, to install the new seats and breathe new life into the bleachers that are key to the fair’s success.
“If we don’t have the bleachers, the chuckwagons and such would still run but we wouldn’t be able to afford to bring them in (next year) if we didn’t have the gate money from the grandstands,” ag society secretary-treasurer Cheyanne Erickson said.
Volunteers from around the region — as well as some paid staff provided as in-kind donations from the town and county — will be at the track today putting it all together starting around 9 a.m.
Anyone interested in getting involved is invited to come down to help out, but Erickson warned there would be a lot of heavy lifting involved.
“We won’t turn down anybody who shows up, but we don’t want the phone ringing off the hook with people who want to help but physically can’t,” she said.
The grandstands and the track itself were at risk of having to be moved after the town announced in 2012 the area would be redeveloped as a town recreational site. That spurred a fundraising campaign to move the track — at a cost estimated to be near $1 million — but the society got a reprieve when the newly elected council changed direction.
Mayor Ralph Leriger said in March that since the town’s master recreational plan is not even yet developed, and funding priorities for the next couple of years will be in areas other than recreation after the 2012 completion of the Westlock Rotary Spirit Centre.
“The town needs to do a master recreation plan before we do anything else,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of point in forcing them off the grounds to do something that we don’t really yet have a plan for.”
Erickson said when the ag society learned it wouldn’t have to move the track in the near future, the money raised was instead diverted into fixing the bleachers, which were aging noticeably and were beginning to become a safety hazard.
All the materials, costing roughly $30,000, were ordered back in May and the initial plan was to have all the work finished by the end of that month.
“Due to the weather, and then they stopped for the tractor show weekend, it put a hitch in our plans and put things behind schedule,” she said. “We kind of wanted it done by the end of May, but it didn’t happen.”
Erickson emphasized the society board is committed to getting the work finished in time for this year’s fair, which runs Aug. 15-17.
“Unless the weather hinders us or we don’t have enough manpower, we will have some bleachers,” she said. “We’re crossing our fingers and everything else; we want to have it all done and ready to go by the end of July. That’s the goal.”
