Vendors: Car auction will hurt our business

The Orange County Fair & Event Center’s Board of Directors has voted unanimously to grant a collector car auction company exclusive use of the Orange County Fairgrounds from June 25 to 27, to the collective consternation of OC Market Place vendors who’ll be shut out from doing business there that weekend.

Barrett-Jackson, a giant among car collector auction houses, will be coming to the fairgrounds for the first time next summer.

Its car auctions in Scottsdale, Ariz., West Palm Beach, Fla., and Las Vegas attract prospective car buyers in the thousands, and those who can’t afford the muscle cars just come to watch and be part of the culture, said Steve Beazley, the fairgrounds’ president and chief executive.

But while the event is expected to generate $300,000, the small-business owners who belong to the OC Market Place say they will lose money from it.

Mike Robbins, who has been a market place and fair vendor since 1980, said he didn’t want to attend Thursday’s fair board meeting because he had a feeling he would lose out to the board members.

But the owner of Paradise Cigars spoke on behalf of the vendors.

Robbins reminded the board members of their mission, which is to celebrate Orange County’s communities, agriculture and heritage, and asked if bringing Barrett-Jackson to the community aligns with the board’s mission.

“Welcoming strangers is not a bad thing,” he said. “Welcoming strangers that put the locals out of business is foolish.”

But fairgrounds officials say they are only trying to make the money they lost during the renegotiation of the market place’s lease agreement, and keeping the vendors out for the Barrett-Jackson event should not come as a surprise.

In April, the fair board agreed to lower the rent for the market place in exchange for designating four additional weekends a year to be used exclusively by the fairgrounds, Beazley said.

The market place does not operate during the annual five weekends of the summer fair.

“We know times are tough, but as a state agency, we can’t give rent reduction without it being a gift of public funds,” Beazley said.

The renegotiation of the rent relieved the market place of $1.5 million a year, Beazley said.

Before the restructuring of the agreement, the fair used to bring in $3.5 million each year from the operation of the market place.

Jeff Teller, the market place’s president, expressed disappointment with the fair board’s decision.

While he acknowledges that the fair has the right to take away the additional eight days of operation, he said he doesn’t believe the decision was made in the best long-term interest of the community, the small-business owners and the market place’s loyal customers of 40 years.

“We were in a place where we felt we had no other option, and it’s very hard to negotiate with a gun in your head,” Teller said of the renegotiation agreement.

“But we knew we needed to give our vendors the rent relief that they were looking for in these most challenging times.”

Although Teller said he doesn’t believe the board intended to hurt the vendors, he said it’s a byproduct of its decision.