Former Tri-County Fairgrounds Board Discusses CEO Resignation, State Audit at Bishop Town Hall Meeting

Former Tri-County Fairgrounds Board Discusses CEO Resignation, State Audit at Bishop Town Hall Meeting

Ousted Tri-County Fairgrounds CEO Jen McGuire was a tireless and passionate marketing wizard whose strengths lay firmly in operations, rather than administration. McGuire’s phenomenally successful, award-winning run at the helm came at a time when local fairs received no oversight or direction from the Sacramento office under whose purview that falls—thus it is perhaps understandable that, in the enormous and complex operation of the fairgrounds, some details could fall through the cracks, and this is what occurred. McGuire oversaw a fair regime that was guilty of nothing worse than sloppy bookkeeping and loose adherence to bureaucratic protocol. In the wake of legitimate malfeasance that occurred prior to McGuire’s tenure, an overzealous auditing team combed the Fairgrounds operation, discovered these minor bookkeeping SNAFUs and made mountains of molehills, resulting in the forced resignation of the individual who had taken over an essentially bankrupt Fair and left it the most vibrant and prosperous it’s ever been in its long history.

This was the story told by the former members of the Tri-County Fair Board, who were dismissed around the time that McGuire was forced to resign. In front of a large and sympathetic crowd of community members at the United Methodist Church on Fowler Street in Bishop this past Wednesday, July 31, the fair board narrated the full timeline of the audit and its aftermath.

McGuire had been the CEO of both the Eastern Sierra Tri-County Fair and the Ventura County Fair, before, according to the fair board members, being compelled to resign by officials from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) in a closed-door session in late June. McGuire has stated that she resigned due to health reasons and declined to elaborate when she spoke to the Ventura County Star earlier this year. At the July 31 town hall, the former fair board members described severe stress experienced by McGuire due to an avalanche of online harassment and abuse.

Why do local fairs and their employees fall under the purview of the state? Because, in a legal sense, the Fair is a state agency. The Eastern Sierra Tri-County Fair is known as the 18^th District Agricultural Association, in the parlance of the CDFA’s Division of Fairs and Expositions. The 18^th District is part of the CDFA, as are all statewide Agricultural Districts.

The picture painted by the former board depicts a complex tangle of overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities, with obligations given by the state unaccompanied by funding or even compliance oversight, until the arrival of a heavy-handed Sacramento auditor whose demands were unrealistic to the day-to-day operations of the fairgrounds.

The board acknowledged that the CDFA’s performance audit does highlight genuine issues in the 18^th District. This was echoed by former Inyo-Mono CAO Leslie Chapman, who also spoke at the event. “They need to fix a lot of stuff here,” she said at the town hall. “There’s no getting around that.” The audit reports a variety of issues related to documentation, receipts, and expense reimbursements. A reading of the audit suggests perhaps an unclear relationship with the non-profit “Friends of the Eastern Sierra Tri-County Fairgrounds.” Checks were marked in handwritten pen as going to the Foundation, when they were initially made out to the Fairgrounds. There was a wide disparity in beer sales revenue that ought to have gone from the Foundation to the Fairgrounds, to the tune of nearly $100,000. McGuire suggested this was due to the revolving door nature of the Foundation’s volunteer treasurer position.

While the board members did note that the audit articulates many areas of improvement for the operation, they also alleged that the document contains many “half-truths and lies.”

Notably, the CDFA’s audit alleges no embezzlement. Rather, other findings regarding funding center upon shortcuts and loopholes around policy and proper procedure. For one example, the audit claims that McGuire received a Paycheck Protection Plan grant during the Coronavirus Pandemic. The Fairgrounds ought to have been ineligible for this, as they are technically a state office. The Board noted that thirty other fairgrounds received PPP funding without complaint. Chapman was still serving in her capacity as Inyo CAO, and noted that at the time, everything was above board in her estimation.

For another, the audit reports that McGuire (named as “Manager A” in the document; McGuire has confirmed to the Ventura County Star that label refers to her) hired another employee as a temporary 125-day independent contractor, though that employee was already close to that time limit. This led to the employee exceeding their employment limit by thirty-one days. At the July 31 town hall, the fair board argued that the 125-day rule is often counterproductive to operations because an employee accumulates knowledge of the operation and is then replaced by someone new who must again be trained. They noted further that in regards to the 125-day rule, several other fair CEOs have acknowledged that they did exactly as McGuire did.

That employee features in the more dramatic aspects of the audit, as the document alleges that McGuire was in a personal relationship with that person (named in the audit as “Employee B”), which she intentionally kept secret from the state. An ex-employee of the 18^th District made the auditors aware of the relationship, according to the audit. Meanwhile, McGuire told the Ventura County Star in early July that the state had approved the two of them working together in Ventura.

As a pot-sweetening bargaining chip in McGuire’s contract, the Fairgrounds offered McGuire a free RV space (also resided in by Employee B) so that she would have a place to stay in Bishop, with the added benefit of having the CEO on the grounds at all times. This is apparently contrary to the regulations of the CDFA, whose auditors argue that McGuire and Employee B must repay the back rent for this RV space. The fair board members said that Deputy CDFA Secretary Michael Flores told them that the office issued a notice eighteen months before the audit that fairs could not give out RV sites as part of an employee’s compensation. The fair board members said that that notice was never received.

McGuire and Employee B are involved in perhaps the strangest allegation in the audit, strange because the version told in the audit does not align at all with the version told by the board. The audit alleges that McGuire and Employee B intentionally withheld a State-owned laptop, describing a situation in which the laptop they had requested was switched for a clean laptop by McGuire, who intentionally handed them the incorrect device. The auditors, they claim, returned to the Sacramento office, and only then realized the laptops had been switched. They claim further that when they asked McGuire why she had switched the laptops, McGuire responded that Employee B would not have been able to do her work. The board’s version of events is simply incompatible with this account. According to the board, the auditors were not handed a laptop by McGuire—rather, the auditor simply grabbed a laptop without consulting anyone in the office and took it back to Sacramento. This is either a seismic misunderstanding, or one version is purely dishonest. They both can’t be true.

At the heart of it all, the board members stressed a state regulation regime that is ill-suited to the needs and day-to-day operations of a fairgrounds. Chapman noted that many of financial issues would be easily corrected or never would have happened if they had an accountant on staff, but that is easier said than done due to state regulations.

Those regulations have been opaquer and more difficult to follow than one might expect. The fair board noted that the 2024 audit was the first the fair had received since 2009. It was pointed out at the town hall that training in state compliance is basically non-existent, and if they are trained, it is minimal and not directly related to the accounting aspect of fairgrounds administration. It was suggested at the meeting that the reason for this is the Eastern Sierra’s relatively remote location, but in fact fairs across the state are presently facing similar issues—for example, McGuire’s predecessor in Ventura, Stacy Rianda, faced allegations of financial irregularities at the Big Fresno Fair when she was manager there, the Ventura County Star reported.

To understand the roots of the problems faced by the Tri-County Fair in 2024, one must revisit the 2007 nationwide subprime mortgage lending crisis and the ensuing Great Recession, the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. The effects this event had on state budgets across the country were catastrophic, and California was no different. As one measure to help close the shortfall, then-California Governor Jerry Brown’s 2011-12 budget called for the elimination of $32 million from the General Fund earmarked for statewide fair support. In a bullet point on page 164 of that document, the budget reads: “Eliminate General Fund support for the Network of California Fairs—A permanent decrease of $32 million as a result of removing state funding for support of the fairs.”

According to report I2019-4 from the State Auditor’s Office, the budget cuts to the CDFA resulted in the elimination of thirty positions, including its auditors. In 2015 the office regained a fraction of what its funding had been, allowing them to add back a single auditor. In the 2019 report, the CDFA laid out the goal of conducting biannual audits for all district agricultural associations—obviously, in the case of the Eastern Sierra, this did not happen. In their response to the Auditor’s office 2019 report, the CDFA stated that because of the 2011 spending reduction, their workforce was “stretched” and the association “could no longer provide adequate training in accounting practices to ensure compliance with state accounting procedures.”

A primary complaint from the fair board on McGuire’s behalf is that she never received proper training that would have gone a long way in rectifying the complaints detailed in the audit. Further, the pattern of behavior described by board members at the town hall meeting certainly seems to depict an overly busy, stretched-thin office. Regularly late to meetings, uncommunicative, unreceptive to critique and at times downright aggressive and hostile, is how the fair board described the behavior from Sacramento’s auditors. They conducted the audit at the outset of the fairgrounds’ busiest season, without regard to convenience or lack thereof to local schedules. During the audit investigation itself, aggressive lines of questioning, board members claimed, at times veered into inappropriately personal territory.

The exception to this tone of hostility has been CDFA Branch Chief Mike Francesconi, whom the board described as doing a capable and excellent job after having been put in a difficult position as interim Fairgrounds boss. Francesconi was initially supposed to be extremely temporary in his tenure, but that tenure was extended past the fair event itself.

After this year, they said, the Fairgrounds is in limbo. The gloomiest of predictions mentioned at the town hall represent an existential crisis for the fair’s future iterations. A long-term goal of local ownership of the fairgrounds, thus bypassing the CDFA entirely, was suggested at the town hall, and received favorably by those in attendance.

Fairgrounds Board Members and Eastern Sierra residents at the July 31 town hall were uniformly effusive in their praise of McGuire, both personally and in her capacity as Fair CEO. Her reputation seems to have been similar at her other position, as Ventura County Fairgrounds CEO. “She got more done at the fairgrounds in the short time she was there than past managers that had been there for years,” Jim Naylor, owner of the Ventura Raceway at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, told the Ventura County Star in early July. “She was a doer.” Dan Long, the president of the Ventura County Fairgrounds, speaking of McGuire’s administration of that facility, told the VCS: “There are no improprieties that we are aware of, of any kind.”

The Youtube live chat on Eastern Sierra NOW’s livestream of the town hall was less uniformly positive towards McGuire and the board. These individuals in the chat would appear to be highly invested observers, as people sharing the name of those accounts comment frequently on posts about McGuire and the fairgrounds across various online platforms. Those individuals found the board members’ arguments to be unpersuasive handwaving away of genuine malfeasance and clear misappropriation of funds. Some of what was reported in the audit could not be attributable to sloppy paperwork, they argued. It was suggested that the board was covering for McGuire out of friendship and loyalty. While it was unclear where most of these commenters reside or what connection they have to the Eastern Sierra Tri-County Fairgrounds or its board, at least one of the individuals indicated that they were from Ventura, the location of McGuire’s other CEO position. McGuire’s dual capacity as CEO of both fairs has brought attention upon the Eastern Sierra Tri-County Fair from outside the area, reflecting similar issues occurring at local fairs across the state of California.

If you would like to contact Kevin McCormick, the author of this article, you may do so at [email protected].

If anyone has any additional information on the Fairgrounds and would like to make a statement, contact us at [email protected]. 

Kevin McCormick