It's been years in the making but the Tyler City Council meeting Wednesday, March 28, could give them a hard deadline to move locations.
The East Texas State Fair has been on the same site for more than a century, and even without the meeting tomorrow, they have plans in the making to move.
"The fair has grown, the city has grown, the Rose Garden came into being, the stadium has come into being, Harvey Convention Center has come into being and things got really tight around here." John Sykes, President of the Park of East Texas, parent nonprofit for the ETSF said.
The ETSF has eight more years on the lease and then it will move to the 238.9 acre property it bought back in 2005.
Sykes says the fair outgrew the fairgrounds years ago, and that parking has been an issue for 30 years.
"The fair itself sits on about 12 (acres). By the time we fence it off we are on about 22 acres for the entire fair. A fair that has 250,000 people on 22 acres, you're not going to find one anywhere in the country on a postage stamp like that." he said.
The reason they haven't already moved the fair to the larger property is due to costs.
"Coming up with the money to build new facilities, build parking lots, handle the infrastructure, is that the money is really difficult to come by which is the reason it hasn't happened." he said.
Multiple plans have been have been designed for the property but the cost is an issue. Some of the plans cost over $60 million.
"We came up with an original program that's simply too expensive to build so we began to cut from that point and cut down, cut down, cut down, and cut down." Sykes said.
To move out to the future location will cost a minimum of $13 million and from there, they are hoping to add on throughout the years following.
Sykes believes,"Developing a piece of property that big gives you more opportunity to do anything and everything."
He says when the lease is up at the current location there is no way they can let the fair die off, it means too much to the local economy.
"It has a huge economic impact on the local community of well over $10 million and it's not something we want to forget about or do away with because it's been a part of the family for well over 100 years." Sykes said.
Right now the fair is working on raising the money needed to move out to the future location.
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