Law enforcement officials have a busy weekend ahead of them as more than 60,000 people are expected to converge on the Iowa State Center.

About 50,000 people are expected Saturday to attend the Iowa State-Nebraska football game, which is followed by the Dixie Chicks concert at Hilton Coliseum. Republican vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney will make a visit to the football game, and about 1,500 people will be in and out of the Scheman Building for an animal ecology conference, said Sara Huber, advertising and promotions coordinator for the Iowa State Center.

“There will be lots of people coming and going and everyone has a car,” she said. Huber said people should plan on arriving early at any of their events.

The events add to the work load of the Department of Public Safety, the Ames Police Department and the Iowa State Patrol officers who must work extra hours to cover all of the events.

“When you consider that we’ll have people in place in the morning for the Nebraska game and a number of them will work right on through the Dixie Chicks concert – those are long, long days,” said Loras Jaeger, director of DPS. “We generally use about everybody; they’ll just have expanded hours.”

Jaeger said people will start arriving early to Saturday’s game, which has a 2:30 p.m. kick-off.

“The Nebraska crowd is always an early arriving crowd, so we will have a number of officers in early, especially in the area of parking,” he said.

People will be leaving and coming at the same time, which will be the biggest problem facing law enforcement, unless Iowa State wins.

“We have only so many roads in and out, and we can only move people so fast if we are going to do it safely,” said Doug Houghton, parking division manager. “When you have 50,000 people in four acres, it takes a while to move people around.”

Houghton said it will take about three hours to get everyone into the stadium and parking lots for the football pre-game.

“Because it is a crowd of over 50,000, it will take a much longer time to get the people out, and right on the heels of the football game is the Dixie Chicks concert, which is sold out,” Jaeger said.

Cpl. Rory Echer of the Ames Police Department said his department hasn’t added any extra officers for the weekend.

“We always schedule officers to work the concerts and always have officers work the football game,” he said. “It’s hard now because we have two events on the same evening.”

Things could change if Iowa State wins the game, Echer said.

“If they win, we’ll hold officers over for extra security in case anything happens. What we’re anticipating is that more people will stay in the area if they win,” he said.