Fair Committee Votes 4-3 To Maintain Cream Puff Booth Precedent Over Funnel Cake Expansion

WAUKESHA — The Waukesha County Fair planning committee voted 4-3 Monday night to leave the cream puff stand's booth footprint unchanged for the 185th fair, rejecting a proposal from newest committee member David Paulson to reallocate 8 feet of midway frontage to the funnel cake concession. The vote, taken with two of the committee's nine seats empty, closed out a 55-minute agenda item that opened with a procedural question about whether the item was allowed to happen at all.

Committee member and cream puff contest judge Arlene Dorn, absent Monday for what the minutes list only as "prior commitment," had raised that question in writing ahead of the meeting: whether a vote on booth square footage amounted to "arguing the pastry question," which chair Diane Vandehey, 61, ruled off-limits until September at the committee's July 22 session. Vandehey read Dorn's objection into the record herself, then ruled that booth footprint is "a capital planning matter, not a pastry matter," and let the item proceed.

The distinction let the committee spend the better part of an hour discussing, without technically discussing, the same rivalry Vandehey had tabled six days earlier.

The Proposal

Paulson, 54, attending his third meeting since joining the committee in May to fill an at-large vacancy, presented a single-page memo tracking funnel cake sales growth at 6 percent, 9 percent and 14 percent over the last three fairs. He argued the trend justified expanding the stand's pad from its current 10-by-16 footprint to 10-by-24, using 8 feet currently occupied by an equipment shed the committee has discussed relocating since 2019.

"Funnel cakes attract younger demographics and food trends," Paulson told the committee. "The data supports growth. I'm bringing you the data."

Vandehey, who has chaired the committee for six of its eleven years of concession disputes, said the stand's location was set at the fairgrounds' 1987 ribbon-cutting and has not moved since, regardless of any given year's sales totals.

"This fair has featured cream puffs since 1987. We don't reinvent tradition on a whim."

— Diane Vandehey, fair planning committee chair

Vandehey added that the committee's own concession figures, read into the record at the July 22 meeting, are scheduled for formal discussion in September and "will still be the numbers in September," making Monday's memo, in her view, six weeks premature regardless of its outcome.

The Vote

Roll call proceeded member by member. A member of the funnel cake faction called the 1987 footprint "a fossil with a service window." A member aligned with Vandehey called the proposed expansion "a solution to a problem measured in percentages nobody asked the committee to solve." The motion to expand failed 4-3, with Vandehey among the four. Even with two of the committee's more tradition-aligned members absent, including the Town of Genesee dairy producer who has held the same holdout vote on unrelated matters at each of the last two meetings, the precedent held.

Paulson was among the three in favor, along with two members whose votes are recorded in the minutes only by seat number, a practice the committee adopted in June after a disputed tally at the fair's closing debrief.

The Shed

The vote may have been moot regardless. The equipment shed Paulson's plan depends on relocating has appeared on the committee's capital agenda in six of the last seven years without a scheduled move date, a fact committee secretary confirmed remains true as of Monday. Asked whether the funnel cake stand could have expanded into the 8 feet even had the vote gone the other way, the secretary said the shed would need to move first, and that no one had proposed when.

Vandehey closed the meeting by confirming the committee's full concession rivalry, tabled at the July 19 debrief and docketed for September, remains scheduled for September. Asked whether Monday's vote counted as a preview of that debate, she said it did not, on the grounds that square footage and unit sales are "different categories of number."

The committee's next session is scheduled for August, ahead of the September meeting Vandehey has now twice described as the only appropriate venue for the pastry question. Paulson said he intends to bring an updated memo.