DEENA WINTER / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Wednesday, October 25, 2006 7:00 pm
Two members of the State Fair Board squared off over whether the state fairgrounds should merge with the Lancaster Event Center during a meeting of the mayor’s arena task force Thursday.
Their verbal sparring overshadowed the rest of the meeting, during which the task force voted to recommend that the Nebraska State Fair and Lancaster Event Center combine campuses.
But they did not designate where. The task force has previously supported consolidation of the two, so Thursday’s vote was anticlimactic.
Task force chairman Dick Campbell invited the group to weigh in on where the two venues to colocate, but nobody was brave enough to make a motion on the subject, so the matter died.
But it’s clear most of the task force supports moving the fair to the Event Center campus near 84th Street and Havelock Avenue.
That’s also the desire of a high-powered private group called the 2015 Visioning Group, whose existence was revealed in the press this week. The group wants to move the fair to make room for an expansion of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The state fair board representative on the task force, Tam Allan, didn’t hold back during Thursday’s meeting. He lambasted city Finance Director Don Herz for not consulting the State Fair Board to come up with consolidation cost estimates. He questioned who served on Herz’s committee.
He needled attorney Kent Seacrest about who he was representing (Seacrest is a member of the 2015 Group).
And he sparred with UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman over the legitimacy of Herz’s cost estimates.
In the end, the task force avoided the touchy issue of which entity should move, and simply expressed support for co-location of the two.
The task force will polish up its final report next week and then present it to Mayor Coleen Seng.
Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.