At an October meeting of the Ohio Expositions Commission, which controls the state fairgrounds and will vote in coming months on whether to allow Crew’s Mapfre stadium to expand into a team practice facility and community sports park, submitted a capital-budget request for the new multi-use agricultural building and youth center

As the panel that governs the Ohio Expo Center and state fair considers a proposal to donate 23 acres of the fairgrounds to a new city of Columbus park, it too wants something — a $25 million, state-financed exhibition building.

The Ohio Expositions Commission, which controls the state fairgrounds and will vote in coming months on whether to allow the Crew’s Mapfre Stadium to expand into a team practice facility and community sports park, voted in October to submit a capital budget request for a new multi-use agricultural building and youth center, Expo spokeswoman Alicia Shoults said.

The Crew and the city propose that the Expo Center give up what is currently a large percentage of its parking lot for Mapfre improvements as part of the project to build a new soccer stadium Downtown west of the Arena District. Mapfre would become the team’s practice facility and be surrounded by city recreation fields.

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Virgil Strickler, general manager of the Ohio Expo Center, said last spring that he opposed the plan because it would consume needed parking for major events such as the All American Quarter Horse Congress.

Although Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther said last year that failure to support the city project would lead to Mapfre Stadium becoming "vacant and abandoned," Strickler countered that the state’s lease with the team requires the Crew to remove the stadium from the site upon termination of its lease.

Though the proposal for the new fair building was first conceived in just the past few months — so recently that there are no architectural plans supporting the $25 million projected cost — the building is envisioned to be similar to the 100,000-square-foot Kasich Hall that opened in 2016, Shoults said. That facility contains a large, multi-use hall surrounded by smaller meetings rooms.

The site for the proposed building is yet to be selected.

Gov. Mike DeWine said in August that the state planned to accommodate the city’s Mapfre proposal.

But on Tuesday, DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney said it was too early for the governor to commit to backing the new Expo Center hall, and that the request would be sent for review to a DeWine task force, Expo 2050, currently examining the future of the fairgrounds.

"Our preference is that it continue to be looked at holistically as part of the Expo 2050 work," Tierney said.

On the same day the Expo board submitted the request in October, Dr. Scott Myers, CEO of the Ohio Quarter Horse Association, told The Dispatch that his group supported the Mapfre transformation. He applauded DeWine’s leadership "to examine additional opportunities for the Ohio Expo Center site that will benefit the All American Quarter Horse Congress, the Ohio State Fair and attract additional events to the central Ohio region."

bbush@dispatch.com

@ReporterBush