Denise Maier helps run a family business at the fairgrounds. Maier said between she and her husband, their son and his fiancé, they have more than 15 horses and the ag board’s Oct. 21 decision came as a shock.
“I think when you evict somebody out of their house, they get longer than this — let alone when you’re dealing” with horses, Maier said.
“That’s how we make our living and I don’t know of any other way to make a living,” she added.
The 6-4 vote by the ag board, also known as the fair board, is facing both local and state scrutiny. State Rep. Scott Lipps, R-Franklin, said he is asking Ohio Auditor Keith Faber for a special forensic examination of the ag society’s finances and questions whether the eviction date will stand.
The Warren County commission, which owns the 94-acre fairgrounds, also has questions about the fair board’s operations.
The commission wants to meet with board representatives — and possibly other impacted parties — soon, perhaps Nov. 12. Fair board Treasurer Casey Fodor has declined to comment on disputed financial issues until that meeting.
But if the fair board’s decision is eventually enforced, “upwards of 300 people are immediately and directly impacted from a job perspective,” said Scott Hagemeyer, an Ohio Harness Horsemen’s Association director.
Hagemeyer said he disputes the financial data presented to the fair board before it voted to evict and asked Lipps and state Sen. Steve Wilson, R-Maineville, to intervene.
Hagemeyer said the economic impact on the local agriculture community — for grain and hay alone — would be more than $800,000 a year.
Warren County has one of the highest horse populations of any county in the state and “one of the largest central hubs for equine veterinarians” in Ohio, Hagemeyer said.
“We’re talking doctors … that are going to be out of a job because there’s no horses to provide these services to,” he said.
In some parts of Ohio, “a lot of times owners will have to call veterinarians (who) are an hour or an hour and a half away,” Hagemeyer added.
The horses at the fairgrounds are “not just riding horse that every now and then gets a saddle put on them,” he said. “These animals seven days a week are performance athletes.”
But aside from the county fairgrounds, there are no options within a 90-minute drive of Lebanon for boarding horses, both owners and Hagemeyer said.
“If these horses are truly evicted and thrown out into nowhere,” he said, “these families that make a living off of those have to decide: Do they get another job? Do they sell their house? Do they move their family? Do they take their children out of school and move to where the job is?”
Many of those questions have been in Tessa Perrin’s thoughts. She and her husband have a fairgrounds stable with more than 10 horses.
“We don’t have another job,” Perrin said. “We don’t have another source of income. This is what we do. This is what we do to pay for our lives.”
Perrin said she is a registered nurse and “there are things that I could do, but nothing that I’d rather do. This is what we’re passionate about.”
Perrin said: “I just keep hoping that it’s not gonna happen, or that it’ll be delayed, or that we’ll figure something out as far as some sort of compromise. Because it just seems unreal.”
