'Wel-Fair': Taxpayers Pay $1.4 million to Subsidize the Wyoming State Fair

This week, the 99th annual Wyoming State Fair hosted a swine show, a performance pork contest and even a “pig ‘n mud” wrestling championship. But the biggest hog of all? The fair itself.

The fair has become a pricey pork barrel project that uses Wyoming state tax dollars to subsidize more than three-quarters of the cost of operating the event each year.

In fact, state lawmakers snatched more than $1.4 million from taxpayers to bankroll this year’s fair, which ends its eight-day run on Saturday.

If the attendance figures hold steady this year, every time someone pays the fair’s $3 admission fee, taxpayers will spend $32.29 to subsidize the rest of the cost of the attendees’ visit to the fair.

So why is the Wyoming State Fair such a budgetary burden?

Part of the problem is that Douglas, where the Wyoming State Fair is held, is just this side of East Jesus. The town has a population of only 6,120 and sits 50 miles from Casper and 125 miles from Cheyenne, the only two cities in the state with a population over 50,000.

Since few people are willing to travel an hour or more to visit a state fair, the Douglas area simply doesn’t have the population base necessary to financially support the event.

However, the bigger problem is that state lawmakers give fair administrators no incentive to break even. According to the 2004 audit of the Wyoming State Fair, “Neither the statues or the budget laws require the state fair to be self-supporting.” As a result, the Wyoming General Assembly is free to use tax dollars to bail out the state fair year after year.

Wyoming isn’t the only state subsidizing its state fair from the pockets of struggling families:

For years, the Illinois State Fair, which also takes place this week, was America’s most heavily-subsidized fair. According to a recent state audit, the fair saddled taxpayers with a staggering $33.9 million in losses from 2001-2009. Taxpayer subsidies for this year’s fair are expected to top $800,000.

In Utah, the state fair received $675,200 from the pockets of state taxpayers to keep afloat this year.

The 2011 Indiana State Fair, which was marred by the tragic August 13 collapse of a concert stage and resulted in the deaths of five fairgoers, cost state taxpayers $600,000. That’s on top of the $1.6 million Hoosier State lawmakers frittered on the fair in 2010.

North Dakota’s fair is schedule to receive $365,000 in tax dollars each of the next two years.

But this year, Wyoming is the grand champion of state fair subsidies. Since 2005, taxpayers in the nation’s least populated state paid out an astounding $10.6 million – a cost of $50.99 to each family in Wyoming – just to keep the state’s failing fair from going belly up.

Fortunately, some states are wising up. In 2009, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, in one of the few good moves she made as governor, took the state’s fair off the dole. The decision to shutter the Michigan State Fair now saves Michiganders an estimated half-million dollars per year.

For Wyoming taxpayers, however, state “wel-fair” will only get worse before it gets better. The state legislature has promised up to $250,000 in taxpayer-funded grants to finance a celebration honoring the Wyoming State Fair’s 100th anniversary next year. That quarter-million dollar giveaway is on top of another $1.4 million already earmarked for the fair in the state’s 2012 budget.

Wyoming would be smart to follow Michigan’s lead and stop wasting taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars bailing out the state’s bankrupt fair. Until that happens, the Wyoming State Fair deserves a blue ribbon for government waste.