For the third year in a row, there will be no Hawaii County Fair come mid-September.
The Hawaii County Fair Foundation, the fair’s nonprofit organization, said in a statement that E.K. Fernandez Shows/Carnival Events, which brings the carnival midway to Hilo, can’t commit to fairs on the Neighbor Islands due to higher shipping costs and staffing challenges.
“The main hurdle is getting the carnival, which is located on Oahu, to the outer islands at a feasible rate,” said Kelton Chang, the fair foundation’s president. Chang added that interisland ocean cargo company Young Brothers “doesn’t want to budge” on its shipping rates.
Chang said Hilo’s fair, plus the Maui and Kauai county fairs are “partners” and E.K. Fernandez ships its rides, games and other attractions consecutively from Oahu to Kauai, to Maui and then to the Big Island to save costs.
“We used to travel for about $250,000,” said Scott Fernandez, E.K. Fernandez’s president. “The last time we traveled, in 2019, it was about $700,000, and that was just with the barge costs. But I also have to self-insure and pay for any damages that occur on that barge. And we have to fly our crew there. We have to house them.”
Fernandez said the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the government shutdown was “devastating, really” to his operations, and he lost the crews that packed up the carnival and took it on the road.
“All of our experienced staff that helped us move … a lot of those crews went to Florida, Texas and Arizona, which were open in late 2020, so they could do what they do,” he said. “A welder wants to weld. People involved in the carnival industry want to do carnivals. So a lot of them went to mainland shows in jurisdictions that were open and available. Here in Hawaii, we weren’t open. We were the last state in the entire union.”
Big Island wasn’t the first to announce the cancellation of its fair for 2022, according to Chang.
“Maui Fair Alliance is having the same struggles that we have. They already announced their shutdown last month,” he said. “And I was waiting to see if we would be able to do our fair with what they had given us, as far as a price. There’s no way that we can swallow that freight cost in any way or form.
“It’s just unfortunate that we have to wait another year and see how things go as far as if prices are going to come down. It puts our fair in jeopardy of possibly never returning.”
The 50th State Fair started this past weekend, and is running until July 4 in the parking lot at Aloha Stadium on Oahu. Fernandez said there were crowds of 20,000 for the fair’s opening weekend.
“E.K. Fernandez has always been wonderful about bringing the fair,” Chang said. “But being shut down for two years without any income and trying to go back to the same ways they did before, pre-pandemic, is impossible.
“It’s heartbreaking that they can’t come out to the outer islands, but you look at the price just to get the fair to Kauai, Maui and the Big Island and then, to Oahu, it’s ridiculous. It’s almost a million dollars.”
In 2023, E.K. Fernandez will have been in business 120 years and has longstanding relationships with the Neighbor Islands’ county fairs.
“We’ve been with the Maui County Fair for 97 years and Hilo is somewhere in the mid 70s or so, decades and generation,” Scott Fernandez said. “People say, ‘When will you be back to normal?’
“Well, we operated through the 1918 (Spanish flu) pandemic. We didn’t stop operating. During World War II, Dec. 7, 1941, we were attacked by the Japanese at Schofield Barracks, and we were shot up. If you take all the wars in the history of humankind up to World War II, more people were killed during World War II than all the other wars put together. Two months later, E.K. Fernandez Shows was operating.
“This shutdown in the islands has never happened before, so we’ve never experienced it in 120 years. So we have no experience, no historical record to look back on and say, ‘OK, how did they deal with this? How long did it take for them to rebuild?’ There’s so many different variables it’s difficult to say.”
That said, according to Fernandez, he and his company wants to return to the Neighbor Islands “as soon as possible.”
“We really do,” he said. “We miss all of our customers there. We miss our sponsors. And our staff really enjoys it. Every day they tell me, ‘We want to go.’”
That sense of qualified hopefulness was echoed by Chang, despite the cancellation of the 72nd Hawaii County Fair.
“We’re still around and we want to come back and put on a quality fair,” he said. “But we have to be mindful of expenses, because we don’t want to put ourselves in a hole and lose the chance to ever come back. Hopefully, we’ll come back and put on the fair for many more years to come.”
According to Young Brothers, chartering a barge is a premium unregulated service that includes the cost of a tug, barge, wharfage, fuel surcharges, and cargo handling charges based on the dimensions of the items being shipped, in addition to labor charges for the crew on the vessels and at the terminals.
“Young Brothers offers specialized services to our customers who need to move oversized items like fair rides between our island communities, including an option to charter a dedicated barge, where their cargo can be consolidated on a single barge outside of our regulated sailing schedule,” a Young Brothers spokesman said.
According to Young Brothers, it hasn’t received an inquiry from any organization for any charter request for fair rides to or from any island during 2022.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.