Progress

The meeting went well! If anything, I was over-organized, but I only had an hour and a clear idea of what had to come first...which was galvanized by some late information that morning. That didn't derail anything but was an interesting wrinkle for sure. Seventeen people came and everyone was interested, though I don't expect everyone there wants to be part of a task force. I will ask the Board to appoint me to head one, and maybe can come up with a clever name for it. At the moment it is DTD Task Force, which stands for DownTown Developments. Rabble Rousers wasn't really a good fit for the activity we are doing, but it was tempting. The energy was exciting.

I was glad that I had reviewed the Park Blocks Master Plan the night before, which was adopted ten years ago in 2006. It is still a very good plan for the space. We didn't get to discussing our preferences for the Park Blocks upgrade, but that will be the next thing on our agenda.

We mostly wanted to reground in our values, and craft a response to the UO group doing the feasibility study for what they are now calling "Public Market," which began with the LCFM request for site improvements. That request is old, really old, and it does appear in the PBMP. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that the farmers could use a better space. The study has a lot of elements and I won't go into detail, but the $4.5 million allocated will most likely not build any of the proposed concepts. Even if it did, the only plan so far for maintenance and business costs of a building is from user fees. Which would at least double the fees the users are already paying for the costs of their organizations.

We know as an organization that low-cost business incubating is essential to our mission, so there is no way we can move into a place with fees that will be double or more than what we are paying. We also know we are committed to our outdoor event, and to the rest of our values as seen in this little poster I made, so it is pretty clear that the concepts don't match our reality. Whether they match the reality of the farmers is a different question that they have to answer.

The group, or rather my other poster, clarified that we have a large list of differences with the farmers' market even though we started out together. Most of them are significant operations and structural disparities so any type of co-selling arrangement would involve big changes for one of us...and we don't want to change anything about how we are running our organization. Just as the farmers have made these changes to fit their needs and keep them viable according to their ideas of what farmers' markets need, we know what craft markets need and what we don't. Tuesday Market works okay when there are only a small number of crafters who want to participate, and the differences matter there. We've made it work. No one knows how Tuesday Market will fit into the plan, but I've pretty much resigned myself to an end to my participation in it at some point. Guess we'll see about the small details once the bigger ones are worked out.

Co-selling works when it is co-location; everyone agrees on that. Virtually all of our collective members on both sides of 8th St. agree that we want to stay together and like where we are. The vision I see for the Butterfly, which is the Plan A location for farmers' site improvements, is not really any of the concepts presented in the feasibility study. I see City Hall with a very nice plaza that could have some semi-covered or flexibly covered space for the farmers and any events the City wanted to hold there, and in and around the City Hall could be lots of bathrooms, some secure bike parking, some subsidized office space perhaps, and maybe a meeting room we could use for free when we have the bigger meetings that we frequently have. We like our office, and we like being independent, but only about 20 people can fit in our meeting room and that is crowded. We have 600 members who could potentially want to gather. The times we have done so, we've done it on the Park Blocks outside, or inside the Fairgrounds at Holiday Market.

This doesn't even list them all

We dream of an alternate location for Holiday Market, and so do the farmers, but that seems out of reach. We need a big space, and the two organizations together need two spaces. So that's a tough one, but it needs to be discussed. 

In fact, the main problem with the whole plan is how it plays out in the area of competition. If the new site involves expensive structures that need income, the temptation might be to put in some commercial stores of some kind, or food trucks, or other outside businesses. In fact the feasibility study includes up to six "anchor businesses." Add that to the language of "Public Market" and history rears its head. Ask me if you don't know the history of that other public market over on 5th St. There used to be craftspeople there and now it is fully commercial. If indeed we are the best thing going in downtown Eugene as we've been told (by people from NYC even!) the City and County should be rather concerned about putting unfair competition right next to us (cough cough free speech plaza no we don't want to talk about that).

A Food Truck Hub or import shops or tote bag stores or whatever would not help our Market thrive. And somewhere we will also make the statement that closing streets is bad for business, in case that is in the back of anyone's mind. We still have our lists of all the reasons why we don't want the streets around us to be closed to traffic, even though consultants and placemakers love to close streets and fill them with people. We need access, because all of our people have to carry things, heavy things, and they use cars to do that. Farmers Market shoppers need access too, and parking has to be available for them. None of the concepts in the study mentioned parking except to say it would have to be available off site. Somewhere.

We at Saturday Market are lucky to have almost fifty years of institutional memory. We still have people who were there at the beginning, not the least of whom is Lotte Streisinger, who developed the original idea and who comes to shop every week. We use her written history on our website and I used it for the poster. Ours is a living history. We know how old we are (47th season) and we know how old the LCFM is (about ten years younger) and we like to be honest. I should have put that on the poster. We are what you see, and we are happy with who we are. We're not in the market for change or to make more money, except in the usual way of getting better and solidifying our great qualities as we grow older. We wish the farmers well in their project for site improvement, but we have drawn a few lines in the proverbial sand.

I should be typing up the notes from the meeting instead of this and I guess that is next today but I thought people deserved a report. The meeting was a big deal for me and really intense, packed with effort, but now it seems like a normal activity and it seems I have added a big volunteer piece to my plate of those, which was not exactly what I had planned for this time of year. I was supposed to go get some plywood and fix the west side of my shop. I hope I will still do that, but I felt called to reground our membership. I feel good about it. It's something we should do more often, really, just get together and remind ourselves how we are when we are doing our best. We're damn fine.

And Saturday rolls around once a week and is coming soon! I love it. Looking around at the people in the room who have all been there to work with me in the past, I was energized and grateful for how well we can work together. It's not a simple thing, this participatory seeking of consensus and a way forward. It's actually quite fun when it goes well and super valuable as a life skill when you consider how different many of us are from each other and in our lives. I'm looking forward to the next meeting.

I can hardly wait to load up again and trundle downtown. I do hope they get 12th St finished up though. They went right down to the bed on the streets they're replacing and on Tuesday I had to go several blocks outside my route. It will be nice when it is all smooth and solid again.

Sure, that's a metaphor. Brings up some other thoughts about some other issues. Maybe I am not out of things to write about after all, as I had been thinking. There's always something.