Fewer people visited the Santa Barbara County Fair this year due to ‘challenges with attendance’
Dave Alley
SANTA MARIA, Calif. – The Santa Barbara County Fair wrapped up Sunday night ending its five-day run at the Santa Maria Fairpark.
According to Santa Maria Fairpark Board of Directors President Kevin Merrill, the fair was an overall success, but ended up finishing with lower attendance numbers compared to previous years.
“We really enjoyed some great days,” said Merrill. “Our numbers were down a little bit, but I think the folks that came out had a really good time.”
Merrill felt that outside circumstances related to current immigration enforcement was a primary reason numbers were lower this year.
“I think we had a lot of challenges here with attendance,” said Merrill. “There was a lot of stuff going. One of the big things we’re hearing about fairs all up and down the state is the ICE raids that are going on and people are a little bit afraid to come out and that did affect us.”
Official attendance numbers won’t be known for at least a few days, so Merrill was unable to provide detailed information on how just how much the attendance dropped this year.
“I think given the demographic we have here in Santa Maria, the ICE rates are a real concern of those folks, and they get scared about coming out here. They see the potential for something going bad and so they didn’t come out. Our numbers will come out later, but we know we are down this year, but I think it was good news for the folks that were here. They had a good time. They didn’t have long lines and the weather was perfect.”
While fair attendance was down, the Junior Livestock Show and Auction ended up with solid numbers compared to past few years.
“We had a great sale on Friday and Saturday,” said Hailey Rose Switzer. “We had a small animal sale Friday morning, a heifer sale Friday evening, and our large livestock sale on Saturday all day. Our sale ended up at 9:00 on Saturday night. We broke over $2 million on the sales altogether. It’s a great number. I know last year was similar. We still have “add-ons” open, so there’s still money coming in for all the kids.”
The overall amount brought in during the two-day auction was $2.3 million. The number of animals sold was just under 1,000, a bump up from the 2024 total.
Our livestock number here is very large compared to most county fairs,” said Switzer. “We put about 1,000 lots across the block. Most county fairs are a lot smaller than that, so we’re very lucky here in Santa Barbara County. We had some great local support here over the two days of sales that we had.”
With this year’s fair now over, planning already starts for the 2026 edition, which will be held during a still-to-be-determined five-day run next July.
“A lot of the staff is already working on that,” said Merrill. “They look at the things that work really well and how we can build on those, and they are going to look at the things that didn’t work quite so well, such as which vendors helped, which didn’t. There’s a lot of challenges and a lot of moving pieces here to a fair.”
Merrill added one of the biggest challenges to this year’s fair was a lack of a chief executive officer, which the Fairpark has been without the past few months.
Since previous CEO Caitlin Miller left in March, the Fairpark held its two biggest events, the Santa Maria Valley Strawberry Festival in April and the Santa Barbara County Fair, without a top executive.
In the interim, temporary leadership from neighboring fairs in Antelope Valley and Kern County were brought in to help assist with operations.
Now, with the fair over, the Fairpark Board’s top priority will be to find a new CEO as soon as possible.
“The Board will start working on that here shortly,” said Merrill. “We will be working with the State up in Sacramento and we’ll get somebody in here who has some experience and can guide us in the right way and get us back on track. We need somebody who really knows that industry and we’re be looking out for them.”
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