New CEO, new attractions at the Sonoma County Fair

New Sonoma County Fair director Becky Bartling shares what’s not to miss at this year’s fair, kicking off Friday.|

Opening day of the Sonoma County Fair always stirs up some anticipation and excitement. Livestock have been meticulously groomed for auction. Wood carvers, painters and photographers are primed to compete for ribbons. And kids can’t wait to get to the carnival rides.

But for Becky Bartling, hired last December as the fair’s new chief executive officer, this is a particularly important day. Friday’s opening of the annual Sonoma County Fair marks her official public debut as the steward of a beloved local tradition.

She already has made a change in the live concert format, ending a five-year experiment with big name arena concerts that required an extra ticket beyond the cost of fair admission.

This year, concerts will be moved from the Chris Beck Arena to the smaller Community Theater Stage and will be free to fair-goers once they’ve paid for admission. Acts scheduled include ABBA tribute band ARRIVAL; Grammy-winning Los Angeles band Ozomatli; Cassadee Pope, winner of the third season of the NBC-TV vocal competition series “The Voice;” and veteran country music star Aaron Tippin.

“Fairs traditionally are successful with attracting a larger audience by having free concerts and free entertainment,” she said. “So what I did this year is book five different shows that are all free, and next year I hope to double that amount.”

In addition to the Community Theater Stage concerts, free music is featured continuously on several stages scattered around the fairgrounds, as always.

“I looked at the type of entertainment that we were having, and I felt we were missing the nighttime experience of the fair,” said Bartling, 59. “We needed to have some kind of entertainment every night.”

Other changes this year are smaller but could be crowd-pleasers. On a recent afternoon, while this year’s Hall of Flowers display was still under construction, Bartling led visitors past the hall’s new larger wine and beer garden.

In past years it was inconspicuously located in a corner, but this year is planted right in the center of the hall.

The wine and beer garden is decorated with giant movie tickets and framed movie still photos, to match this year’s fair theme - “Lights, Camera, Fair!” - which celebrates the famous movies shot in Sonoma County over the decades.

The Hall of Flowers re-creates the back porch from a Santa Rosa house in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film noir classic “Shadow of a Doubt,” and a huge mural shows the Bodega schoolhouse scene from Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller “The Birds.”

After 22 years as chief operating officer, or second-in-command, of the San Diego County Fair, Bartling moved to Healdsburg and said she’s enjoying her new start in Sonoma County.

This year’s fair features a number of modest changes - a second Ferris wheel at the carnival, increased entertainment aimed at the fair’s large Latino following and a package deal for horse racing fans that includes box seats and a buffet meal.

It also retains the popular walk-through live butterfly exhibit and the pig races, overseen by Jane Engdahl, the fair’s specialist in zany contests.

In the future, Bartling hopes to introduce broader changes.

“A couple of things I want to do for next year’s fair are create a craft brew festival and work on a distilled spirits festival,” she said.

As the new fair director, she sees opportunities for new events and attractions at future fairs and throughout the year at the fairgrounds, some of them suggested by her long experience in fair management.

“We’ll be looking this year into hiring a salesperson to help us bring more events into the facility. We’re pretty busy, but we can always be busier,” Bartling said. “We’re very active on the weekends, but we also have a lot of opportunities for corporate meetings, different kinds of business meetings, trade shows.”

Currently the fairgrounds presents about 300 events a year, but with multiple venues available on the grounds, there is potential for more, she said.

“We did a lot of things in Del Mar that became very successful. Besides the fair, we produced a very popular Halloween festival with four different haunted houses. That’s an opportunity outside of the fair,” she said.

“One thing I’d like us to look at that was very popular in San Diego is boxing. On Sunday afternoons, we did boxing. We did some fun stuff, where we’d have the battle of the New York police versus the New York firefighters. That was successful.”

But of course the most important attraction is the annual Sonoma County Fair.

With the arrival of the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit train later this year, Bartling hopes to extend the fair’s reach to a larger geographic area.

“I really want to promote, and draw from, Marin County and get into San Francisco. Hopefully next year we can work the SMART train. I think that’s a wonderful opportunity to bring people from the city and Marin County.”

In the long run, Bartling envisions a fair that will embrace more and more of the community.

“My goal is to bring more things to the fair to draw a more diverse crowd,” she said. “I want to make sure that the fair has something for everybody and that the entertainment we produce here appeals to the demographics of Sonoma County. And I want everybody to feel welcome and invited to the fair.

“It’s a bigger bang for your buck as a fair attendee to have your fair admission include all the other things, not just the concerts. Seniors get free admission to the fair on Thursdays, and kids are free on Fridays. You can bring your lunch. So you really can spend the entire day here but not spend a lot of money,” she said.

“A lot of people think the fair is rides and animals. But there are also many other things: all of the exhibits that we have, and the hundreds of people who enter exhibits in the fair.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.

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