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Take time on Market location
?It’s regrettable, as Roger Varley reports on page 7, that a Council debate on a potential long-term lease for the Farmers’ Market at the Uxbridge Arena turned a trifle nasty Monday night. The future of such a positive development as the Market has become over the last few years shouldn’t be the subject of name-calling and petty bickering.
Maybe the chief movers and shakers of the Market should have been there Monday to answer questions in person, rather than making Councillors Eng and Herrema defend their position just because they happen to be farmers. And maybe the urban councillors who favour moving the Market downtown should have consulted more with the farmers over the summer. But it’s difficult to understand why, if the issue is clearly so divisive at present, why a vote was forced first on a recommendation from staff, and then on a bylaw approving the lease.
What’s the rush? The Farmers Market only shut down a couple of weeks ago, and won’t re-open until the second week of June. That leaves plenty of time for Council to sit down as a Committee of the Whole (which all its standing committees are anyway) with representatives of the vendors (not all of which are farmers, of course) and discuss all the options, all the pros and cons, and then if the decision is still to proceed with a new lease at the Arena, pass a bylaw, get the grants, and install the power service and other improvements before June.
We ourselves are sympathetic to the downtown idea - the rest of the merchants could do nothing but benefit from the traffic the Market brings - but perhaps Centennial Park isn’t the best locale. It’s not high visibility, there’s not a whole lot of parking, and the grass would suffer in a major way from the stalls and all the foot traffic between them.
And what downtown locale is better? The big lot behind Mac’s is a flood zone - the Market never grew when it was there before - and just about every other large plot of land has parking or visibility issues.
Kennedy House? Almost everyone would have to drive there, and Market organizers say they get a lot of walk-in traffic at the Arena. The High School? It’s not really a whole lot closer to the downtown shops than the Arena is. So maybe, when all is said and done, the Arena is the best possible site, especially with the improvements the Market is proposing.
But maybe it’s not. And although the Market is eager to sign its lease so it can apply for Trillium or other grant funds for the site, we think its too important a decision to make hastily. This is perhaps a classic case where having the third reading of a bylaw a few weeks after the first and second, to give opportunity for sober and considered discussion, makes a whole lot of sense.
