GREENFIELD — A few years ago, Fred Steiner received an emergency call while at the post office. A water wagon had tumbled from the edge of the Franklin County Fairgrounds after a big ravine had opened up along the edge of the plateau off Wisdom Way.
A civil engineer said not to worry, for now. It wasn’t affecting anyone. The next year, Steiner, the president of the Franklin County Agricultural Society board, received a panicky call from a Linwood Street resident below the fairgrounds, at the foot of the plateau. Steiner arrived and looked up the embankment toward the fairgrounds. The problem had gotten worse.
“It was like opening up a fire hydrant and watching all the dirt come out,” Steiner said.
The erosion is now threatening not just homes below the fairgrounds but potentially threatens the annual county fair’s solvency itself.
With water and mud rushing onto the Linwood Street property, Steiner and the fair’s board sought a new solution. They spent about $20,000 on building a swale to divert the water overflow. It was a plan they thought would be a permanent fix, but it turned out to be nothing more than a Band-Aid. That winter “water was blowing right out of the ground where we had all this work done,” he said.
Steiner and his board, which runs the annual Franklin County Fair, which will enter its 172nd year this summer, hold their breath every time it rains, hoping to avoid a devastating mudslide that could be similar to what happened to the nearby Green River Cemetery in 2011 and required federal assistance.
Consultations with the same engineer who worked on the cemetery mudslide have been developing in recent months. Steiner began to expect the worst. Maybe $200,000 or $250,000 to fix the problem.
This past month the board learned the cost to fix the potential mudslide down the fairgrounds’ embankment will cost about $500,000.
“I shook for half an hour,” Steiner said this week. “To take on a debt this size, in a few years it could quickly put the fair out of existence.”
While fair buildings aren’t at risk, it is the responsbility of the agricultural society to fix the embankment issue or risk liability for damages below on Lindwood Street. Paying for the repairs on its own could sink the society financially.
Steiner and fellow board member Michael Nelson, who is also a selectman in Montague, are now looking to solve the finance issue that affects the future of the fairgrounds, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The board expects to begin a public fundraising campaign to help pay for the debt. Soon there will be buckets around the county where people can donate, including in local businesses, and they are in the process of setting up a GoFundMe online donation page. They will also be accepting donations directly to the fairgrounds.
“When people ask about the future of the fair, my response always is we’ve been here for 171 years and we’ve made it throughout a tremendous amount of change in the country,” Nelson said, noting two world wars, the Great Depression and shifting financial markets. “It’s going to be very hard, but we need the public’s help.”
Part of the issue is the fair has run into tighter finances following the Great Recession in 2008.
“We’ve been challenged to get back to the financial status we were in before the recession,” Nelson said. “We’re just now beginning to rebuild that savings.”
Recently, Steiner and Nelson have been in conversations with the local elected officials. In November, they showed the issue to Rep. Paul Mark, D-Peru, then-Rep. Stephen Kulik, D-Worthington and Rep.-elect Natalie Blais, D-Sunderland.
“We were able to see firsthand what their concerns were,” Mark said Friday.
At the time there was not a price to avert the mudslides.
Last month the board received a detailed report on how to solve the problem. It focuses on drainage, digging manholes with underground piping that can lead the water over to a brook, to Laurel Street, the catch basin and out to the Green River, which is where it already goes, but not with this exact route.
It will require taking out the whole embankment, reducing the slope by 75 percent. When they took a sample of the soil, 60 feet below, it is all fine sand. They need to reseed it with grass, shrubs and about a dozen trees. They will also be looking for someone who might find the fine sand useful to their business.
The board has pursued funding opportunities with the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, but because the agricultural society is a nonprofit organization and not a public body, the federal agency that oversees MEMA overruled giving money, Nelson said.
They also spoke with the U.S. Department of Agricultural Natural Resources Conservation Service. While the department was helpful, Nelson said, the agency was in a funding crisis and did not have the budget to assist in part because of the government shutdown.
U.S. Congressman Jim McGovern, D-Worcester, said he is looking into federal funding possibilities. It’s possible FEMA may be more receptive to a call from the congressman. His office is also looking into potential assistance from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
McGovern’s staff is planning a visit to the fairgrounds in the near future.
“I feel very strongly about supporting our farmers and our agricultural economy,” McGovern said Friday. “Occasions like the Franklin County Fair that celebrate agriculture help people better appreciate the work of our farmers and the food that’s grown and raised here.”
“To me it’s incredibly important to keep it going, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure it can continue,” McGovern said.
Nelson is confident the proposed solution is one that will work, although he noted the potential effects of climate change are a variable at play.
At a board meeting this week, Steiner said they needed to come together and work as one, “and hopefully we’ll see the daylight at the end of the other side.”
The embankment is seen as somewhat stable, Nelson said, at least for the next year or two.
“In the meantime it’ll remain being an inconvenience and nuisance to the neighbors as it continues to flow down there,” Nelson said.
The fair is run by volunteers, Nelson noted, and is maintained by private funding. It’s a “labor of love” that they know can open this year but are uneasy about in future years.
“The good life would be we wouldn’t have these problems,” Steiner said, “but we have these problems and we need to fix them and address them so we keep going on.”
You can reach Joshua Solomon at:
jsolomon@recorder.com
413-772-0261, ext. 264