Revamping the state fairgrounds is no horse play for Cal Expo. What’s next? | Opinion
For 170 years of California state fairs, there has always been horse racing. This summer will break the streak, as a dying industry has retreated to a handful of Southern California tracks, leaving no horses available for Sacramento racing.
With horse facilities comprising more than a quarter of the footprint at the 360-acre Cal Expo, that’s a lot of dormant space for the coming fair. It was undoubtedly a painful decision for the Cal Expo Board of Directors to abandon the horse racing tradition this year. But there is little reason to suspect that a dying sport in California will reverse itself.
Cal Expo is arguably facing the most important redevelopment decision in its 56 years at the existing site. If not horse racing, then what? There can only be so many tractor pulls in town in a year. This is a massive reuse project. And Cal Expo, an obscure apparatus of the state under the Secretary for Food and Agriculture, is going to need all the friends and vision it can get.
Cal Expo is “an unfunded state agency,” said Tom Martinez, its chief executive officer. That means that it has to generate all the revenues to manage this 360-acre property from the events that it hosts, the summer fair being the annual highlight. And this summer, the grandstand designed to hold more than 4,000 horse racing fans won’t be helping to sustain the fair.
Aside from the annual run of thoroughbreds at the fair, Cal Expo has long been the site of harness racing from the fall through spring. But these events have been waning as well. In 2010, there were 81 harness racing days, Martinez said. This year, he expects 39 days of racing. This sport’s demise led the board to cancel its contract, meaning no harness racing next year.
“This whole industry got shaken up this year,” Martinez said. It began with the closure last summer of Golden Gate Fields in Berkeley, the Bay Area’s premier site for horse racing since 1941. The owners took their horses elsewhere. “They’re either in Southern California or racing in other states, whether that be in Washington or Arizona,” Martinez said. There will not be a county fair anywhere in Northern California with thoroughbred horse racing this year.
Absent some infusion of outside state funds, Cal Expo must either self-finance any redevelopment or partner with the private sector. There have been various ideas for new land uses at Cal Expo over the years, such as a movie studio. Absent a way to use the grandstand for other events, Cal Expo is staring at a huge undertaking requiring some very deep pockets.
The death of one idea — a homeless shelter championed in 2023 by Gov. Gavin Newsom — illustrates the inertia that Cal Expo is up against. Not even a governor could change the footprint at Cal Expo. His idea was opposed by Sacramento County supervisors, leading to a political gridlock. Insular governance structures are always problematic. They’re even more so when the governance faces a huge undertaking that is best resolved through partnerships with the city and county along with investors in the private sector.
This cherished institution feels dangerously close to the edge. Moving the fair to the scorching Sacramento month of July fits with all the other county fair calendars, but it has sentenced all fairgoers to sweating it out on the asphalt. Last year, by almost a miracle, attendance was up 10% despite 11 days of three-digit temperatures. Although the fair announced it would search for a different month for the festivities, no decision has been made. And now the primary uses for the grandstand are gone.
To save itself, Cal Expo is going to have to think big.