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Friday was Lincoln Mayor Chris Beutler's first trip, and he's impressed.

“This is a great, great fair and I'm actually surprised how developed it is, how sophisticated it is, frankly it's better organized in a physical sense than it ever was in Lincoln,” he said.

Beutler says both communities have benefited from the decision to move the fair from Lincoln to Grand Island.
He said, “Lincoln campus needed to expand and what's happened at Innovation Campus has been very positive for the whole state. By the same token, this fair has definitely benefited from the change.”
This is now year number eight in Grand Island.
We also talked to Lieutenant Governor Mike Foley. He remembers people who said Grand Island could never support the fair, but he says the naysayers have been proven wrong year after year.
In fact, the fair now attracts more visitors than it did in Lincoln.

Joseph McDermott, the fair's general manager, said 136,275 people visited the fair in Grand Island over the first four days. That's a 5.5 percent increase over the same Friday-through-Monday stretch of 2016.

Last year, nearly 361,000 people attended the 11-day event.

Pentatonix drew a sellout crowd of 12,846 on Saturday, when attendance at the fair approached 63,000. That's the second biggest day in the fair's history since moving to Grand Island in 2010.

Joseph McDermott, executive director of the fair, said Tuesday that attendance at the annual event, which ran from Aug. 25 through Monday, was 379,108, up 18,001 over 2016 for an almost 5 percent increase.

The 2017 attendance is about 10,000 fairgoers shy of the record number of 389,171 established in 1997 in Lincoln, he said.

In 2009, the last year the State Fair was held in Lincoln, attendance was 367,203. The fair moved to Grand Island the following year.