FARMINGTON – It hasn’t been a week since the merry-go-round, the Ferris wheel and all the animals left the Farmington Fairgrounds and already work has started for next year’s fair.

“We’re just in the preliminary stages,” Neal Yeaton, secretary of the Franklin County Agricultural Society, said Wednesday. “It’s mostly the changes you want to make to classes, you make a note of during the fair.”

Right now, he said he’s working on figuring a way to spread events out a little bit. “We had a couple of days that were real crunched in the amount of things (going on), and then some la-la days,” he said.

But even with the busy days, the fair was down about 10 percent in revenue and attendance this year, Yeaton and Treasurer John Stansfield said this week.

“Our normal attendance is about 30,000,” Stansfield said. “Our big drop was on Wednesday and Saturday.”

Threats of gang violence seemed to make many parents fearful of letting their kids come to the fair alone on Wednesday – typically one of the fair’s biggest days – he said. “When I started seeing things in the paper, then I knew we were in bad trouble.”

The fair’s other biggest day, Saturday, it rained. “Once it cleared off people started coming in,” Yeaton said. The loss of revenue won’t affect next year’s fair, but it might decrease the amount the Agricultural Society has to make improvements to the Fairgrounds, he said.

But all told, it was still a great fair, both agreed. “The weather was great, except for Saturday,” Yeaton said.

Besides, the fairgrounds had a new tenant in the form of the Little Red Schoolhouse. And now that the festivities are over, society members are hoping folks in the community will volunteer to help get the building back in shape for visitors.