THE TAMWORTH Show society is in renewed negotiations for a sale of the showground site at Taminda with plans also under way for a move.
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The pastoral and agricultural association said yesterday it had resumed sale discussions with a prospective Sydney buyer from about eight years ago.
Association president Brett Nies said it had also renewed plans to move from its old site to the Australian Equine and Livestock Events Centre.
Mr Nies said the show society was adamant it would hold its 2017 event at AELEC, whether the showground sale proceeds soon or not.
“We are going there in 2017. If we haven’t sold by August 31 this year, we stay put and have our 2016 show here and then we go to AELEC in 2017,” Mr Nies said.
“We have to draw a line in the sand at some stage.”
He said a Sydney company had recently shown reignited interest after having first shown interest in buying the 15.3ha Tamworth Showground site when it hit the market in 2007.
“They walked away for several years for a number of reasons and now they’re back,” he said.
The showground was for sale for “less than $10 million ”.
But Mr Nies was sceptical of the Sydney company’s plan to buy the showground in a “staged sell-off”.
“That’s risky for us,” he said.
“We’ve got to look after community money here ... a straight-out sale would be the go, but we may not get the figure we want or what it’s worth, so there’s probably a compromise to be made somewhere, at some stage.”
He also said that Harness Racing NSW “may be interested again”, despite the organisation waiting to see whether approval on its development application for a new trotting track at Burgmanns Ln was going to occur.
He said there were “a lot of balls in the air” but there was no doubt the decrepit showground infrastructure needed a lot of money spent on it “which would be a waste of money”.
Mr Nies said the community and council kept telling him they wanted the show to go to AELEC.
“The council is pretty keen to get us out there,” he said.
“They’ll bend over backwards to help us ... I think they have an obligation to help facilitate the move out there. They told us that they’ll help us once we move out there.”
He said the pastoral association would probably ask for state and federal funding to help them set up infrastructure at and near AELEC.
“We will need a new headquarters, probably next to the Australian Quarter Horse Association,” Mr Nies said.
He said infrastructure – including at least three new buildings on the AELEC site, with new glass display cabinets and new poultry cages plus cattle lawns and rings – would cost in the region of $5 to $6 million.