I remember the Los Angeles County Fair as the place my son got the whirlies so badly on a carnival ride that he needed to visit the medical tent. And the place of my dad’s late-life triumph, taking home ribbons for his budgerigars, the parakeets he reared in a backyard aviary.
Who knew that county fairs could also be the place of mismanagement and fraud? Jessica Garrison did. She’s my Los Angeles Times colleague, who just came out with an investigation exposing the popular and seemingly wholesome annual celebrations of food, carnival rides and farm animals as the scenes of theft, bribery and embezzlement.
Jessica found that one-third of the state’s 77 fairs have been cited by state auditors or government officials over the last decade for misusing taxpayer money, pressuring businesses for bribes or treating public resources as their own. “At still more fairs, officials have been called out in government reports or lawsuits for glaring failures of good governance,” her story reported. A 2016 state audit found the Los Angeles fair, based in Pomona, paid its president more than $1 million in salary and allowed dangerous housing conditions at an RV park on fairgrounds.
It’s not hard to see what brought on the trouble. Fairs amount to big businesses but operated by legions of micro-entrepreneurs, often overseen by local grandees who are deeply entrenched. It takes skads of contracts to provide hot dogs, cotton candy, deep-fried everything, carnival games, parking, security and more.
Why transparency is important in fair management
“They help each other. How business is done is insular. It’s not open or transparent,” David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University, said. Combine that with the big money at stake, McCuan said, and you’ve got a recipe for mismanagement and corruption.
Fairs may seem quaint along California’s urban and densely populated coast, but…