Trina Mills, who took over the job of manager of the Greater Grand Forks Fair and Exhibi-tion on April 2, has resigned her position, she told the fair board in an e-mail Tuesday night.
Mills said she was proud of the work she'd done for the five-day fair, which wrapped up Sunday, including the media coverage, fair attendance and cleanliness of the fairgrounds. But she said she was disappointed that two major grandstand events had been canceled and not rebooked, causing big disappointment in the community. She thanked everyone who had "pitched in and helped me along the way."
When Mills became fair manager, she and others attended a conference of the Interna-tional Association of Fairs and Expositions, where she said leaders told her the Grand Forks fair "had more need for improvement than any other fair in the four-state region."
In her resignation she said: "Improving your fair would require new leadership with a fresh perspective and approach, a leader who understands the power of recognizing the positive instead of searching for negatives in every situation, allowing the manager to man-age, behaving in a helpful and not hurtful way, a desire by all to pitch in until each task is completed, and the realization that you can't keep doing things the same way you have al-ways have and expect better results."
