Milwaukee Talks: State Fair Executive Director Randy Prasse, 2007

OnMilwaukee.com: Randy, it's been a year since we last sat down and talked. What has been going on during the last 12 months?

Randy Prasse: We've turned our first profit in seven fiscal years; that's huge. Since we last sat and talked, (State Fair Park) has posted a $1.6 million profit. The Fair, itself, has always been profitable, but the park's year-round operations have been posting deficits the last seven years.

OMC: The naming-rights deal with U.S. Cellular had to have helped that number significantly.

RP: That helped a lot. That was over half of our surplus this year. There was a lot of cutting costs, too. We saved over $100,000 on energy just by cutting back and being mindful of our electricity usage. WeEnergies actually came out and did an energy audit on us at one point to find out why all of a sudden our usage was dropping so much. A lot of it was just common sense. We went around the park and shut off transformers that weren't being used throughout the year. We went around and made sure people were shutting off their computers. Really simple stuff.

OMC: Last year you talked about getting the deals done for the Pettit National Ice Center and Milwaukee Mile and how it would take those burdens off the State Fair and, in turn, bring about some added creativity for your production staff. Has that started to come to fruition?

RP: I think the prospect of creativity is coming back. I don't know how creative we have been so far in terms of refocusing our efforts on the Fair. We still have an $11 million deficit that we'll need 20 years like this last year to pay off if we're relying strictly on the programming to pay debt service.

OMC: Is that where plans like the I-94 development come into play?

RP: The magic of that is that we wouldn't sell the property to the developer, but instead we'd be doing a land lease. It could generate up to $300,000 in non-program revenue funding. The whole idea and the true benefit to that -- aside from making the Fair Park more usable during the year -- is that it adds revenue independent of program revenue.

OMC: And, in turn, that would have to bode well when the state examines the deficit situation of the Park.

RP: If we develop that, the state accepts that we're chipping away at it. Whatever that property generates would go right to eliminating that deficit so, yes, the state would be more inclined to keep its hands and eyes off what we're trying to accomplish here.

OMC: One of the big parts of the proposal would include a Bartolotta-operated dinner theater. It's an attractive piece of land, isn't it?

RP: There's not a lot of land in the area with interstate frontage along I-94 that's open for development. We should be careful when we talk about the dinner theatre because it still has to go through the RFP process, but Joe Bartolotta has been very vocal publicly about his choice of having State Fair Park be that venue. It's a pretty desirable piece of land.

OMC: Say the development plans goes through, would that hinder any further expansion of the fair? The park, itself, is fairly landlocked in there. How would any development affect the long-term plans for the fair?

RP: For all practical purposes, we're probably not going to get the green light for any new construction until our deficit is gone. New construction, in many ways, is what got us in this situation in the first place. Any new development would have to come after funding is secured. Our foundation has been reactivated and rejuvenated. And as it grows, we hope to be a partner in any capital improvement fundraising.

OMC: Last year, you talked about a new coliseum being something you saw on the long-term horizon. Does that fall into the same category?

RP: The reality is if we want a new coliseum, or want the current one overhauled and enclosed so it can be used for three seasons, is that the revenue will have to be generated from outside of the fair. It's going to take a long time before we can look at doing anything by way of new development. The thing that we made the mistake before was the buildings that should have been maintained were neglected more than they should have been. That was the scenario with the grandstand; eventually total replacement was the only option.

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