The regular Fair board meeting on Wednesday, 11/3 lasted more than 3 hours.
First action of the Fair Board was the acceptance of Tommy Shaw’s resignation from the Board. Tommy Shaw lives since quite a while in Mercer County, which means that he cannot be a sitting member of the Fair Board. Fair Board members are required to live in Darke County.
Former Board member Jerry Marker, who lost at the August’s fair board election by just a few votes to Dean Neff asked the Board to fill the now vacant seat. Just recently the Board filled a vacant seat with the candidate who had the next highest number of votes. Zumbrink made a motion to give the vacant seat to Marker, but the vote failed 5-4
The Board decided that next fair will not have “gender-colored” tickets. There will be 3 ticket colors: voting, non-voting and vendors.
Next topic was the issue with the late-entries at this year’s fair. The Jr. Fair Board made the decision at their meeting to to strip all premiums from exhibitors, and to suspend for one year, all adults/committee members involved and asked the Sr. Fair Board to support this decision.
To avoid the problems that occurred at this year’s fair, the Jr Fair Board also made a motion to use iPads only at the Junior Fair from 2023 on and not to allow future write-ins.
There is still one problem that needs to be looked into: conflicting rules in the rule book. Lipps said because of the way the rules in the book are written, it’s difficult to make any decision on this issue
Manning made a motion to support the junior fair board’s decision, but there was no second, so no decision was made. It was suggested that the members of the Sr. Fair Board attend the next Jr. Fair Board meeting on Thursday, Dec 8.
Werner then talked about the focus committee’s work. The focus committee was created to collect information about possible projects for the capital improvement grant. The committee is not making any decisions at that point.