Business View Magazine | July 2019

204 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2019 Munz, Assistant General Manager of of Marketing and Public Relations for the Oklahoma State Fair. “We’re known as the horse show capital of the world; we have more national and international horse shows than anywhere else in the world. On top of that, we host the State Fair every year in September. Our facility’s versatility and flexibility, combined with our dedicated staff, meet the needs of any type of event.” The Fairgrounds has 130 full-time employees, with about 40 temporary positions year round. “And that number can swell to anywhere from seven to nine hundred during the State Fair,” Munz notes. “In terms of buildings on the property, there are six trade show buildings with floor space ranging from 19,000 to 201,000 square feet, ten round pens used to exercise horses, nine barns, and the Jim Norick Arena.” “We have 3,200 stalls,” adds Bill Allen, Vice President of the State Fair Park. “We are the largest single stalling area in North America that we know of. We have three air-conditioned arenas, with different levels of seating; one seats 500, one seats 1,200, and the other one seats 9,000.” Perhaps the most notable event held at the Fairgrounds, each year, is the Oklahoma State Fair. “The Oklahoma State Fair started in 1907,” Munz recounts. “It was an outgrowth of various farmers’ markets that were in place in the late 1890s and early 1900s. In 1954, the original fairgrounds were moved to its current location at the convergence of Interstate 40 and 44, which is kind of centrally located, west of downtown Oklahoma City.” Today, the State Fair draws approximately one million visitors over 11 days in September. While the Fairgrounds’ niche over the last several decades has been its equine events, Gina Burchfiel, Vice President of the State Fair, asserts that the