(Des Moines)– Governor Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Economic Development Authority today (Mon.) announced a relief package for county fairs hit especially hard by the pandemic. The state is allocating up to $6 million of federal CARES Act funds to provide short-term relief to eligible county and district fairs through what is known as the Iowa County Fairs Relief Program.
Jeremy Parsons, General Manager of the Clay County Fair, says he was very pleased with the announcement, adding they’ll be happy to get whatever assistance they can…
“Of course we’re in the middle of the Save The Fair campaign that’s going on right now and it’s no secret that with no fair you know we lost 75 percent of our annual revenue so this grant program from the state, we’ll be excited to dig into the details and apply for and we know will go toward ensuring a 2021 fair and again it’s nice recognition. You know many aspects of our economy are slowly starting to come back on line through this COVID pandemic but one aspect is not. And that’s the live event business. And for us here at the Fair and Events Center when your whole livelihood depends on bringing people together, we can’t do curbside pickup, we can’t do online. You have to actually have people physically on the fairgrounds and so with COVID obviously we can’t do that, so it’s good recognition from the state that there’s some substantial financial losses occurring.”
Parsons says they aren’t sure yet how much the Clay County Fair will be applying for…
“You know we have not really dug into it. It looks like there’s some various levels. We know again three fourths of our revenue affected, it’s about a three million dollar loss for us. So we’ll dig into those types of things as we really try to see what all is in the program.”
The relief program is an extension of the Small Business Relief Grant Program and is being offered in collaboration with the Association of Iowa Fairs. It provides three different levels of funding at $25,000, $50,000 and $75,000. State officials say the award amounts will be based on demonstrated revenue loss from October 1st, 2019 through September 30th, 2020 as compared with the corresponding period for the previous year.
