Racer on the track during a quarter midget race in September 2023.
Photo by Jon Brennan
Story update Nov. 27:
Two file for quarter midgets track
Two applicants filed to run the quarter midget track at the Evergreen State Fair Park, the county parks department confirmed.
MONROE — The nonprofit that runs youth quarter midget racing at the Evergreen State Fair Park fears it will get shut out of running on its longtime track.
Since 2007, the Washington Quarter Midget Association (WQMA) has raced at a 1/20-mile banked oval racetrack behind the U.S. 2 park and ride. It built the track and its amenities.
Now, competing bidders are looking to run the track.
Quarter midgets are often the first ladder step in motorsports. The drivers are as young as five.
Renewing the lease had been straightforward in past years, WQMA’s past president Jeff Cannon said.
What prompted the county to open it up is another racing group expressed interest in the track, parks department spokeswoman Rose Intveld said.
The bid contract stipulates quarter midget racing must continue. Who’ll run it is what’s come up for bid.
“It’s not an auction,” Intveld said emphatically.
Bids were due Monday, Nov. 18.
The bid package has language it would go to the “highest bidder.” On Nov. 13, a latest-version amendment added a defined scoring evaluation. That came after news reports called it an auction.
But the county’s gone back and forth and back again conducting this call for bids, and was accused by an attorney of violating bidding law along the way. An attorney’s intervention was needed. This latest is its third try.
Intveld couldn’t reveal who has bid.
Cannon said he’s aware a parent who was in WQMA wants to bid for the track to change the sanctioning body from the Quarter Midget Association to USAC. USAC is America’s biggest body for open-wheel sprints and midget racing but Cannon noted it has no presence in the immediate area. USAC’s quarter midget arm is named the NASCAR Youth Series.
Go kart track operator Traxx put in a bid in last year’s bidding round to expand its track size, bid documents show. The company management of Traxx didn’t respond immediately for this story on whether it bid this round. They run a a seasonal, small track in the parking lot next to Evergreen Speedway.
The plan has always been to have this spot feature quarter midget racing, Intveld said.
Mike Ohlsen, the park’s manager, said in a statement that “we fully understand what youth racing means to the kids and their families.”
Ohlsen’s statement continues that: “This is not about the highest bidder—this process helps us to review operation plans and select an operator that best aligns with the site, recreation needs and our mission and vision.”
Go-karts on the midget oval? The idea that Cannon said Traxx proposed was to have WQMA sublease the site but run quarter midgets on the days when karting wasn’t using the track in some other configuration. Those talks between Traxx and the WQMA faltered early, Cannon said.
Cannon said no QMA-affiliated club is trying to unseat WQMA for its Monroe track. It would disrupt a community. Quarter midget racers visit other regional QMA-affiliated clubs to race on their tracks, Cannon said.
The winner will be who submits the highest-scoring application. The lease price is a set yearly amount.
The lease will average about $20,000 a year, or about 2.5 times more than the WQMA’s current $7,823 lease. Cannon said the nonprofit can absorb the higher price.
What if WQMA doesn’t win the bid? It would be its death knell, Cannon indicated.
“Most likely the club would dissolve, it would go away,” Cannon said, because there’s no easy way to buy land to build a new track somewhere.
“It would be a big tragedy,” he said. “That’s why we’re fighting so hard.”
After news stories ran on it, the county property management division amended the bid package that it would score it and published a frequently-asked-questions web page at www.evergreenfair.org/257/The-Quarter-Midget-Track
Until this change, the WQMA nonprofit was quaking it would be out-spent for its home track.
The language of “highest bidder” is boilerplate, the county said.
The bid package was “created from a standard template utilized for property surpluses, which includes the term ‘highest bidder,’” the frequently-asked-questions sheet said.
This is the third time the county has done a bid round since late last year.
The first bid results were canceled out after a bidder’s questions went unanswered before the bid deadline. Cannon said the WQMA had questions that went unanswered during that bid round. He thinks the cancellation was because of this.
The intervention scuttled the second try. After the first round was canceled, the county promised it would inform all the bidders when bidding reopened, but didn’t reach WQMA.
Requests to interview the county property management department and the county purchasing department for this story were not able to be fulfilled by deadline.
Historically
The WQMA’s origins date to the 1960s.
The last time the quarter midget scene faced interruption was 2003, when they raced at the time on Paine Field’s land. Named the Snohomish County Quarter Midget Association at the time, they been racing there for 33-plus years. A change by the FAA prohibiting non-airport activity on airport land meant no more track, said Denise Smutny, the local midget association president at the time who’s today the head of the larger Quarter Midgets of America sanctioning body, in a post on social media.
It was the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that prompted the FAA’s change, Smutny said.
The county worked with the group, and secured WQMA land at the Evergreen Fair Park, according to its history.
___
Update-
This story updates to add the first name of the fairgrounds operator.
