Christmas in the Time of COVID-19
ARTS & CULTURE
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In a year when staying in is required, arts organizations across the county have plenty of virtual options to help you celebrate Christmas day.
Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/tag/oc-fair-and-events-center/)
In a year when staying in is required, arts organizations across the county have plenty of virtual options to help you celebrate Christmas day.
Due to COVID-19 impacts, California may be setting the stage to relinquish state control of some of its fairs. Meanwhile, OC’s Fairgrounds faces an identity crisis.
The Orange County Fairgrounds’ weekend swap meet and hundreds of vendors who make a living there are in limbo.
The audit spans a year, 2018, in which the OC Fair and Events Center was under leadership of former CEO Kathy Kramer, who was fired by the Fair Board in late 2019.
OC Fair Board Directors are expected to consider the request today at their 9 a.m. teleconference meeting.
The cancellation — expected for weeks as the 150-acre fairgrounds property had all but closed its facilities to the public and other county fairs up and down the state already cancelled theirs — was made official by the OC Fair and Events Center Board of Directors at their Monday special meeting.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has forced fair officials to grapple with their uncertain future, under public health orders to limit public interactions and restrictions on mass gatherings, with no guaranteed timeline of when those restrictions will ease.
Both the use of travel trailers on the fairgrounds and this year’s possible cancellation would be in line with other county fairs’ recent actions across the state.
The possible cancellation falls in line with other fairs across the state wary of public health guidelines discouraging mass gatherings for months, at least, as people are already staying at home to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The OC Fair is getting travel trailers and is looking at three buildings on its 150-acre state property in Costa Mesa for potential emergency housing and medical services, as county officials try to find ways to stretch out hospital capacity for coronavirus response.