The three-year, $500,000 renovation plan at the Lincoln CountyMulti-Purpose Facility continues during the first days of 2008, assections of land near the arena are cleared and prepared for futureuse.

Facility Manager Quinn Jordan said the newly cleared land willpotentially be used for parking lot extensions, an RV park and theconstruction of a buffer between the neighboring residential areaand the facility grounds. He also said plans are in the works toincrease the capacity of the stall barn to an estimated total of100 stalls, but pointed to the expansion of the facility’s parkinggrounds as the current most important upgrade.

“Our goal for the facility after all these upgrades is to beable to host multi-day events,” Jordan said. “And in order to dothat, we’re going to need all this additional parking, for people’scars, horse trailers and RVs.

“We especially need a good RV park, because when people come tosome of the weekend-long shows we’re planning on hosting, they aredefinitely going to need a good spot to park their RVs and hook ’emup,” he continued.

The facility’s 2008 events are already in motion. This Fridayand Saturday, the arena will host a free cow show produced by theLincoln County Co-operative Extension Service, with a team ropingshow on Sunday.

Also planned for later in the year is a wildlife extravaganza.Jordan is looking into the possibility of hosting a spring fair,though he stressed the plans are only tentative.

“I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to host the fair or not,because there may be interference from the ongoing construction,”he said. “If it happens, it will happen in April, because I don’twant it to conflict with the Exchange Club’s fair. They have beenvery supportive of us, and we wouldn’t do anything that might takeaway from their activities.”

In the meantime, Jordan said the arena, which reopened last weekafter a short closing for the installation of new river sand on thearena floor, will remain open to the public while the workcontinues.

“The sand is a little too deep,” Jordan said. “We’re going tokeep tilling it and working it in, and maybe even take a smalllayer off the top if we have to. We’ll do whatever it takes to getit right, because the quality of the sand in the arena determinesthe quality of the show you can put on there.

“And it’s great sand; we’re very grateful that we got it,” hecontinued. “We’re just gonna keep on working with it to get it justright.”