I attended tonight’s meeting of the Tennessee State Board of Fair Commissioners (aka the Fair Board). My thoughts on the meeting can be summed up thusly:

2008 was the last season ever of weekly racing at the fairgrounds

I say this for a few reasons. Commissioner Varney’s proposal pretty much means that the Board is washing their hands of the Speedway.

The first is that they gave LJ & J a lease for 2009 that no one in their right mind would sign. While the Board voted to extend the lease for one year back in March, LJ & J didn’t get that lease until the middle of October, and only had until the end of October to sign it. Apparently out of the blue in the lease was the fact that LJ & J would not get to handle the concessions, and that Metro had a blanket contract for concessions that would go into effect with the new lease. LJ & J says they didn’t have time to work out the details with the concessionaire so they made a counter offer on October 31. Tonight the board didn’t act on that counter offer, which means that LJ & J’s lease is up on December 31, 2008.

The second reason is that, while ostensibly they’re going to operate the track in 2009, they’re going to “lease it just like Wilson Hall.” So, if you want to put on a Saturday race, just contact the Fair office and lease track for that weekend. Sorry, but I don’t see that happening. And I don’t see the Fair Board hiring someone to run the track operations. Commissioner Varney already complained that in her time on the board, the money they had had shrunk from $6,000,000 to about $2,500,000 (perhaps Ms. Varney should see a correlation there). Spending money that would take away from the Fair just isn’t going to happen.

Another reason is that they’re going to get Metro Codes to come in and inspect the track facilities. I get the feeling that Codes is going to find a bunch of violations which will keep the track from operating until they’re fixed. As I said above, I don’t see the Board spending any money on the track.

And finally, they’re basically planning on just abandoning the property as a board and giving control of it back to the Mayor after 2009. They don’t want to meet their responsibility as a board and figure out how to use the current Fairgrounds to put on a Fair. Somehow they’re going to come up with a new piece of land somewhere (where there are no neighbors to complain about noise), buy it, build several thousand square feet of exhibit halls, and have the Fair and flea market there.

Now there’s always a chance that someone could offer to buy the property and continue to run the speedway in 2010 and beyond. But they only had one proposal for that, and since they pretty much told that company they no longer wanted to do business with them, I don’t see that happening.

So what will happen is sometime in 2009 the Mayor will make a big announcement about the Fair moving to another place and they’re going to buy the new land from the sale of the current fairgrounds. They’ll sell it to some developer (which probably won’t be anyone who submitted one of those proposals) and they’ll dig up the track and put condos or something on the property.

Nashville Speedway, it’s been a good run. I really hope I’m wrong and that Mr. Dozier comes up with some kind of plan that will allow teams to race on the old track one more year. But I think that’s the best-case scenario. What I’ve outlined above is probably the real-world scenario.

Read my report of what happened at the Fair Board meeting here.