Jun. 20—MITCHELL — A supply of much needed fabric arrived at the Corn Palace and allowed crews to repair 540 of the torn soft seats.

The seat repairs offered Corn Palace Director Doug Greenway some relief after grappling with supply chain issues that held the project up a year past the initial start date.

“This goes back to 2022 when we budgeted for repairing these seats. We ordered the material, but a year went by without receiving any of it. Then, in 2023, I reached out directly to a manufacturer in South Carolina that made us 200 yards of fabric. It was supposed to be two months, but they ran into a supply chain issue with a particular yarn needed to make the fabric,” Greenway said of the reasons the fabric took much longer to arrive than expected.

According to Greenway, the total cost to repair the latest group of soft seats, including labor costs and material, amounted to $7,000.

With the installation of new teal fabric on 540 of the 1,768 soft seats, it leaves roughly 500 soft seats with minor tears in the fabric. Greenway said he will be requesting funds in the city’s 2025 budget to order enough supply to replace all of the torn fabric on the soft seats.

“I will request money to replace everything else, which will be enough fabric for 1,200 seats. We don’t have 1,200 seats that are bad, but we want to get enough fabric on hand to be able to repair any more seats that may get torn in the future,” Greenway said.

Considering the soft seats closest to the basketball court are the most frequently used seats, Greenway said crews replaced the fabric on the lower level seats.

The condition of the Corn Palace seats has been a hot topic among city leaders as of lately. In February, Mitchell City Council President Kevin McCardle led a discussion item on the council agenda to address the growing number of torn soft seats.

McCardle, who was re-elected on June 4, has advocated investing in repairing the Corn Palace seats and fixing other interior issues.

“It’s a place that brings about a half a million people a year to Mitchell, and you’d think we’d want it looking good and keeping it up. If we want people to keep coming here, we have to put some money into it and fix it up,” McCardle said. “Every business in town profits from this building.”

Talks of expanding the Corn Palace and welcoming new seating inside the city’s biggest event venue emerged in 2022 when architects were hired to develop Corn Palace expansion plans. The plans hovered from $42 million on the high end and $36 million on the low end.

The high price tags and an upcoming Lake Mitchell dredging project, which is estimated to cost around $25 million, have cooled talks of a Corn Palace expansion for now.

In the meantime, Greenway said he and his staff are in “repair mode.”

“When you are operating a building as large as the Corn Palace, you’re always in repair mode. That’s part of the job, and we are always looking out for repair work that needs to be done,” Greenway said.