Last week’s unanimous executive committee vote to cancel the 2021 Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo was months in the making.
After the emergence of COVID-19 cut short this spring’s Houston Stock Show, “we realized COVID-19 was something real,” Matt Brockman, the Fort Worth show’s communications director, says.
The annual show, which dates to 1896 and was to be held Jan. 15 – Feb. 6, generates an estimated $177 million in economic activity each year, employing more than 1,000 seasonal people. The committee canceled the show just prior to 90 days before its start, a target for a decision the show set during the summer. Brockman, in his post for 11 years, sat down for a virtual Q&A with Fort Worth Magazine this week.
Start of studying the problem
“When our (2020) show ended, you sigh a big sigh of relief. You begin wrapping up. Right in the middle of all that, we are reading more about this novel coronavirus and COVID-19. What happened at the Houston Stock Show certainly caught our attention [and the] closure of the stock show in Austin. We were seeing these spikes in cases that got worse as we went into June and July. We knew we were going to be confronted with making some really difficult decisions.”
Reaching out for help
Stock Show president “Brad Barnes reached out to a number of people. Probably one of the most helpful was [CEO] Barclay Berdan at Texas Health Resources. He put us in contact with Ralph Baine at TeamHealth, a large physicians group that staffs a number of medical facilities. They had created an infectious disease task force. We had several conversations with Ralph. We were also having casual conversations with [Tarrant County] Judge Whitley and [Fort Worth] Mayor Price and others and some of our own executive committee members. It wasn’t going to be just something that we discussed among just staff.”
Looking ahead to the winter
“Things started looking better when we got into summer. We knew schools would be opening up and trying to open up, and fall sports would occur or try to occur. As we got into the holidays, we knew there were going to be some critical periods where we could possibly see some increases in transmission. No one’s got a crystal ball. We had to go with some assumptions. Virus spread at that time is certainly at one of its high points. We began to look at criteria for large events, the CDC, looking at their risk assessment tools.”
The numbers
“1.2 million visitors over 23 days, crowds that could reach 50,000 a day, 100,000 a day, close to 150,000 a day. And then the other element is the environment and the situation in which a lot of your guests, primarily your exhibitors, are participating in the show’s activities. You begin to see very quickly that being able to take what could be a good plan on paper that would mirror what the experts had laid out and then put in place, you begin to see tremendous challenges.”
Easiest to mitigate: new Dickies Arena and rodeo
“That’s a different animal. You can utilize things like touchless entry, and touchless ordering or concessions, and then seat your facility at that 50 percent or whatever the number would be according to the governor’s order. You can create visitor pods, systems for ingress and egress, reduce opportunities where people would come in close contact with each other. We could do that real easily in Dickies Arena.”
But those old animal barns…
“Then when you look at the various livestock barns, that’s when things got really different in our opinion. It’s the nature of the livestock exhibitor experience. We’ve got youth exhibitors 12,000 youth entries annually) coming here from [across] Texas. Coming here from 4-H and FFA. You’re putting several of them in a trailer that’s towing livestock. They’re here over a period of two to six days. They're working in close proximity as it relates to some of those smaller animals, but even the cattle. You’re using blow dryers and things like that that could spread droplets. [And the barns] aren’t the best ventilated buildings in the world. Those kids are going to lodge together, Interact with each other. By the time you’ve been there six days, that risk increases for contracting the coronavirus. Then they’re loading back up in those vehicles, and they’re going back to their communities, their families, their schools. When you do the risk assessment, you realize there was a high risk of spreading COVID-19 to not just Tarrant County but beyond. At that point, it gets to be a much easier decision to make. We have a responsibility for public safety.”
Deep dive into CDC general readiness assessment
“I’m just reading from this. Daily health checks. Limit staff and attendees to local. Transportation and parking plan. All these exhibitors bring blow dryers to dry their animals. Barriers. Social distancing. What happens if someone gets sick. Isolation room. Knowing people could be asymptomatic or presymptomatic — that was something that really concerned us.”
Why not save rodeo or some parts of the show
“You want to pick this thing apart. Rodeo. Youth shows. Carnival. Shopping. 1.2 million people come for a lot of different reasons. We’ve done the Stock Show from 1896. Added indoor rodeo 1918. We’ve added all these other things. Sip and shop, wine camps. We’re about Texas agriculture. We just didn’t want to get in a situation where we sacrifice some for the benefit of others. It’s painful. It’s still sinking in on us.”
Why 90 days
“We decided we could act too early, or we could act too late. When you’ve got suppliers and contractors that are making preparations and ramping up and arranging temporary employees and arranging supplies, we knew we needed to give those people heads up. We knew we needed to give the exhibitors heads up. We also knew we needed to begin selling tickets. We usually start presales in May. Then our ticket office has traditionally opened Monday after Thanksgiving.”
The 2022 show
“We’re confident that modern medicine is going to move us forward, that a vaccine will be available, and this time next year, we’re going to be very busy getting ready for 2022. This gives us a little bit of time to make a little preparations and to stay on top of this issue and also learn from other shows.”