One thing officials at the OC Fairgrounds seemingly agree on:
Horses should stay.
In what form, however, might change between now and next Summer.
After hours of public comments from equestrians, elected officials and residents – more than 4,000 of whom signed a petition to keep the current facility in place – fair board members at their regular Thursday meeting voted unanimously to explore a new model for the equestrian center where private horse owners and trainers are currently boarded.
One that gives fair officials more control over ensuring public access to the stables.
It’s one of the only equestrian centers in Orange County, which went from agricultural fields to urbanization over the course of the 20th Century.
[Read: OC Fair Officials Consider Fate of Equestrian Center]
In its longtime state, people with horses boarded at the facility have run their own lessons and programming for members of the community, scores of whom – including Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley – showed up to speak in support of equestrians on Thursday morning.
Equestrians said they’re welcoming to outside visitors, offering tours and low cost activities with therapeutic benefits to adults and children with mobility and developmental issues.
“This facility provides a very unique experience and boarding facility for people in urban areas. It’s been great for the kids in this community,” said equestrian Melissa Kremel during public comments, who added horses helped her recover from a brain injury.
“It gives people a sense that the city isn’t closing in on them – that we’re not having all these buildings and having all this traffic and we get peace of mind.”
Fairgrounds officials have questioned whether there’s enough public benefits in the arrangement, or whether they’re subsidizing private horse ownership while losing out on the center’s full public programming potential.
“We have these private businesses that are … providing public services that are valuable, and something we would pay for, but because they’re in the middle – between us – we don’t have that direct line of sight and that visibility, to really feel good about making sure that the public has access to these to these grounds, and that they’re getting that benefit,” said the fair board’s chair, Nick Kovacevich.
As part of their vote – and just days after announcing a request for proposals – fair board members put on hold their search for a new private operator to run the property in its current model.
Instead, they’re exploring a new fairgrounds-owned model for the facility between now and June.
The prospect – mentioned in a staff report which went out before the meeting – raised concerns from the equestrian community, who have been working on their own to find private operators and argued the facility was more accessible under a private operator than when the fairgrounds took control of it this year.
“The number of times I have heard members of this board or this staff say that there is no public programming here, frankly, boils my blood,” said Eileen Anderson, another speaker.
“If there is no public programming, I don’t know what I did two weeks ago when I spent Saturday and Sunday here with Changing Strides (an equine therapy organization), making sure that that public programming for underserved kids went off,” Anderson said.
Fair board members said that, while hard for the equestrian community to accept, it’s a necessary change.
Director Natalie Rubalcava – a City Councilmember in Anaheim – said her vision for public access “would be having somebody who could just walk onto the site and access a horse if they wanted to ride during normal business hours.”
“It would be to have school buses who come on to the facility once or twice a week, and allow the students to learn about horses and ride and all of the things that were mentioned here,” she said.
It’s the latest chapter in a years-long fight over how far the fairgrounds has come from its agricultural resources – and how privatized the fairgrounds has become since its near-sale more than a decade ago, which members of the equestrian community were part of stopping.
“If my program can’t be here, it’s not going to be anywhere,” said Gibran Stout, who runs vaulting lessons out of the facility and has led equestrian advocacy, during public comment. “My base is here, the kids are served here. If it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”
Equestrians, over the course of the debate, have publicly wondered whether fairgrounds officials had ulterior motives, like building a parking lot to pay for fair staff’s administrative office expansion.
[Read: Will the OC Fairgrounds’ Equestrian Center Become a Parking Lot?]
“I don’t know where these people are getting these lies from,” said fair board director Robert Ruiz at Thursday’s meeting.
In 2009, fair officials supported a study on turning the site into parking space.
On Thursday, current board members joined Ruiz in denying that accusation.
“I am not in favor of closing the equestrian center,” said board member Barbara Bagneris.