If everything goes according to plan, the Cumming Fairgrounds will have a new area for people to gather for this year’s Cumming Country Fair & Festival.

At a recent meeting of the Cumming City Council, members voted 5-0 to approve construction of a new pavilion near the bridge over Castleberry Road. The pavilion will be known as Lewis Ledbetter Overlook, in honor of the city’s longest-ever serving councilman who retired from office at the end of 2019.

“If you think back to when we built the bridge over Castleberry Road, we also built a ticket booth, for the fairgrounds, we had one more project in mind at the time, and that was a pavilion next to the ticket booth,” said City Administrator Phil Higgins. “We put that project off immediately because we had the fair coming in right behind the bridge being done.”

Higgins said the original plan was to resume construction of the pavilion in spring 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic meant “everything kind of went haywire” and the project was pushed off again. He said the pavilion would be built “as soon as we can.

“Now, we are looking at the fair coming back in October, and it would surely be a good time to build this pavilion now,” he said. “We’re expecting the fair to be highly attended this fall.”

The pavilion will be located near the new ticket booth adjacent to the bridge.

“Where it’s at over at Gate C, next to the new ticket booth, we really don’t have any covered areas for people to sit and eat or to congregate, and that’s one thing we’ve heard over the years about the fair, that the patrons … wish we had more eating areas over on that side of the fairgrounds,” Higgins said.

Higgins said the project will cost about $64,800, which will be paid for with impact fees and is “right in line” with the cost of building materials.

“This is a complete building except for the electrical [work], which we can get city staff to do the electrical for a few lights and fans,” Mayor Troy Brumbalow said.

Brumbalow said the pavilion would be 20 feet by 30 feet and the concrete pad for the structure was poured during construction of the new bridge.

“It’s enough that you can put double runs all the way down it,” Brumbalow said.

The pavilion will be named in honor of Ledbetter, who served on the city council from 1970 to 2019, when he did not seek re-election.

During his last meeting as a member of the council, Brumbalow announced the planned pavilion would be named for Ledbetter and named him as grand marshal of the Cumming Country Fair & Festival “as long as he wants to serve in that capacity.”