A fair bit of cash

VENETA — Welcome to the third-largest city in Lane County. Well, it will be on Friday, anyway. And Saturday and Sunday, too.

And, no, we are not talking about Veneta. We’re talking about the Oregon Country Fair, which usually attracts more than 10,000 visitors a day during its annual three-day run.

And with all those people comes not only magical, mystical merrymaking (and occasional nudity), but cold, hard cash for a struggling local economy.

If you could travel back in time and tell the organizers of the very first Oregon Country Fair — called the Renaissance Faire when it was held on Nov. 1, 1969, in southwest Eugene — that their humble fundraiser for a local alternative school would mushroom into something worth almost $9 million to the local economy, what might they say in response?

Far out? Groovy? Can you dig it?

Ken Wallstrom can.

“Saves me about $5,000 or so,” Wallstrom said Tuesday.

Wallstrom runs Carefree Farms on Suttle Road, across from the 395-acre fair site. He was referring to the money he saves on hay bales to feed the 30 horses he and his wife, Barbara, raise on their property.

Where does Wallstrom get the hay bales? From the 90 to 100 acres of 3-foot-high grass he cuts each spring with his Hesston 6600 swather on property the fair uses for parking by the thousands who attend. Fair volunteers even buck what amounts to 2,000 to 2,500 bales of hay and deliver it to Wallstrom after he’s cut and baled it.

Months later, Wallstrom returns the hay to the fair, so to speak, in what some fairgoers might see as a spiritual circle of reciprocity. Manure produced by the horses from eating the hay becomes fertilizer for the fairgrounds’ paths and meadows.

Wallstrom has also been using his property as one of several private campgrounds for fairgoers for two decades now. He’s expecting about 1,400 “guests” to start arriving Thursday, parking their rigs at $46 a pop for the weekend. Wallstrom and his family even feed the campers from a makeshift kitchen.

Some in this town of 5,000 might complain about the thousands of colorful folk who traipse through here every year, but Wallstrom’s story is just one that “demonstrates that we have very good relationships with our neighbors,” said Marcus Hinz, in his second year as the fair’s executive director.

It’s also a story that demonstrates the estimated $9 million economic impact the fair generates annually for Lane County, according to a 2009 economic impact analysis conducted last year by two University of Oregon economics students, Luke Hudson and Chris Carothers, and their professor, Bruce Blonigen.

Hinz solicited the study, based on numbers from the 2008 fair, that was conducted in a class called Economic Analysis of Community Issues, Blonigen said.

The results showed that the fair generates about $3 million a day for Lane County’s economy, about the same as the 2008 U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials, Blonigen said. According to Travel Lane County, the trials generated about $28 million for the local economy over 10 days. But the UO study points out that the Oregon Country Fair comes every year, whereas the Trials arrive once every four years at the most.

Some question whether the fair has become a relic of the past, Hinz said Tuesday, as thousands of volunteers worked to ready the fairgrounds for another magical adventure.

“All of this proves the fair is more relevant today than it’s ever been,” Hinz said of the UO study. “We are very healthy, we are very vibrant, and we are very relevant,” he said. “And we are growing.”

Using a “simple sale analysis” like the one Travel Lane County used to produce the $28 million economic impact of the Olympic Trials, the UO study calculated a $5.6 million “total direct impact” for the 2008 Oregon Country Fair. That was based on the assumption that 65 percent of the 46,000 fair tickets sold in 2008 were bought by local residents who spent a total of $75 that weekend, and the other 35 percent by non-locals who spent $166, according to the study. That produced totals of $2,242,500 (29,900 x $75) and $2,672,600 (16,100 x $166). Add in the fair’s $736,396 budget in 2008, and you get $5,651,496.

But a more in-depth “standard spending analysis” by the UO study, to reflect both direct spending (campgrounds, hotels, food and crafts at the fair) and indirect spending (earnings spent by fair vendors, for example, and non-local fairgoers’ spending throughout the community), produced a total spending estimate of about $8.5 million.

Measuring economic impact as non-local spending resulted in “new spending” of almost $3 million, according to the study. And since the analysis was based on 35 percent of the 2008 fairgoers being from outside the area, the actual annual economic impact of the fair could be much higher, Blonigen said. That’s because an exit poll, conducted by fair volunteers as attendees left the 2009 fair, showed about 70 percent of them were non-local, Blonigen said.

“That would mean our estimate is probably very conservative,” he said.