Looking for a sign: Farmers market asks City Council for help attracting customers

SOUTH PORTLAND — A City Council left strongly divided after two different debates will try once more on March 19 to reach consensus on a sign request made by the South Portland Farmers Market, which has struggled to retain customers after a strong opening last summer.

Market leaders are calling on the city to post a 4-by-8-foot sign on Broadway, pointing the way up 
Waterman Drive to the Thursday afternoon setup of booths and trailers in Thomas Knight Park. The issue left the council at an impasse following meetings Feb. 27 and Monday, when the debate centered on whether it would be proper for the city to promote the market so prominently, without doing the same for businesses who sell similar items.

To market organizers, the sign is a make-it-or-break-it issue.

“If they don’t get a sign that’s at least 4-by-6, they’re not coming back,” said Councilor Rosemarie De Angelis, who championed ordinance changes needed to create the market during her term as mayor.

“The market will not survive with tasteful little 2-by-2 signs,” said De Angelis, when her peers suggested smaller alternatives. “They are really hanging on by a thread.”

“It may not be a good economic model then,” said Councilor Gerard Jalbert.

But according to market head Caitlin Jordan, a Cape Elizabeth town councilor who, with her father, Jodie Jordan, runs the Alewive’s Brook Farm on Old Ocean House Road, the problem is not so much the market’s business model as the attitude of city residents.

“Starting a new farm market is difficult,” she explained in an interview before Monday’s meeting, the second on the topic. “You have to reach out to people and get a commitment to make a pretty big change in lifestyle to support local farms.”

A large sign, posted prominently, is the best means of outreach, she said, and the best site is the city-controlled right of way off Broadway, in Ge Erskine Park, on which the council can post a sign of any size, at will.

Although all seven councilors voiced support for the concept of a farmers market, most seemed disinclined to permit a sign, largely on the if-we-do-for-one principle. Jalbert, in particular, questioned an appearance of “showing any kind of favoritism by offering signage on public property for one business and not for others.” He pointed to property taxes paid by permanent grocery stores and markets in the downtown Knightville/ Mill Creek district, wondering aloud how they’d feel about the city offering overt support for the competition.

But not all on the council shared that view.

"I wouldn't take seriously the argument that Hannaford would feel we were being unfair to them because we’re allowing a sign for a market that's open once a week that, essentially, sells lettuce," said Tom Coward, at the Feb. 27 meeting.

“I would like a legal opinion,” countered Councilor Tom Blake, a week later at a special workshop session called March 5. In the gap between meetings, Blake claimed, all councilors received a call from “an individual who said, ‘If you allow this I’m taking you to court unless you allow me to have one of those [4-by-8 signs].’”

“That really got me to thinking, are we opening ourselves up to a lawsuit by allowing signage for a private business on public property?” asked Blake.

Jordan replied that the South Portland Farmers Market Association is actually a nonprofit umbrella organization.

“While the farms inside the association are trying to make money, the farmers market is not trying to make money,” she said. “It is only trying to give farms in Maine a chance to sell to the South Portland community. You’d only be advertising for the farmers market, which is not a private business.”

“I think that’s splitting hairs, frankly,” said Jalbert.

Apart from the fairness question, councilors split over the sign itself, intended to mimic a similar placard that seasonally appears in front of the Scarborough Town Hall on Route 1, to promote the farmers market there.

“I think that’s too big a sign anywhere in this city,” said Councilor Maxine Beecher. “That’s a sheet of plywood.”

“I’m much more concerned with quality over quantity,” said Blake. “It really irritates me when I see a poorly made sign that’s a piece of junk.”

Hard harvest

Although initially popular, the South Portland Farmers Market quickly dropped in attendance last summer, with a host of reasons cited by organizers and attendees, including poor weather, languid promotion, inadequate parking, the Thursday-evening hours and an outlying location. Some even blamed the otherwise-quaint cobblestones, a feature of the park rebuild, when the road that led to the old Million Dollar Bridge was taken down to its original surface, following completion of the Casco Bay Bridge. While nice to look at, the cobblestone and trolley-track combination made for hazardous walking and kept some customers from returning, some vendors claimed, including Richard Piper, of Buckfield-based Piper’s Ranch.

“It’s a hard job for an old man to stand here all day long,” he joked shortly after the market’s grand opening, while kicking at the uneven pavers. “Now, that’s my problem. But, I’ll tell you this, I’ve had a lot of people complain about how hard it is to get around down here. They said they might not come back and you know what, they haven’t come back, and now that’s my problem, as well.”

Jordan said that when the market resumes in June, it will move off the cobblestones and out onto Waterman Drive, with the street blocked off. That will help pedestrian mobility, but obstruct both parking and traffic flow, bound to be an issue anyway given the summer-long reconstruction project scheduled for Ocean Street and Cottage Road.

Still, she said, something big has to be done, and the move out into the street does not seem to be the show of city support farmers are hoping for.

“I am having trouble getting vendors to sign on because last year was so horrible,” said Jordan. “Right now, I have three new applications and one half-completed from a returning vendor. All of the others from last year are waiting to see what’s going to happen. They all talk about wanting to come back and they all believe South Portland has unbelievable potential to be a great, thriving market, but they want to see what happens.”

In November, the market took up winter quarters in the gymnasium of the former Hamlin School (the remainder of which is used as the city planning office) at the corner of Ocean and Sawyer streets, and it’s been tough sledding there, too. Traffic has reportedly slowed to a trickle, with as few as 50 to 60 patrons reported on some Sunday afternoons. Part of the problem with the winter site, De Angelis said at the March 5 meeting, is that no sign can be posted there at all, thanks to zoning restrictions on what is deemed a residential district.

That, said De Angelis, only heightens the need for a sign on Broadway, in preparation for the summer growing season.

“I see this as different from supporting one, single business owner,” she said, in a spirited defense of the sign request. “That’s not what we’re really trying to do. We’re really trying to support a concept of sustainability and help a market survive.”

A local lifestyle

In contrast to South Portland’s woes, Jordan said, a farmers market held in the parking lot at the Scarborough Town Hall has been going gangbusters, with a full slate of 15 vendors signed on already for the season that begins in June. The difference, Jordan said, is the large sign that sits all summer beside Route 1.

“We need something like that, not just something that’s put out on the day of the market,” she said, noting that the South Portland market is unlikely to pull customers from the Scarborough market or the one in Portland – described by De Angelis as the oldest continuously run outdoor market in America. Even though a Thursday date was chosen specifically to not conflict with those other markets, Jordan said, customers there have established buying patterns. The challenge for the South Portland market, she said, is to attract an entirely new customer base, and convert them to the concept of “eating local.”

“For them, we need a sign that’s there on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, to stay in their minds and remind them come Thursday,” said Jordan. “We need that steady reminder in order to get people to commit to a lifestyle.”

According to Colleen Hanlon-Smith of the Maine Federation of Farmers Markets, there are more than 100 such showcases on regular display throughout the state, “which is a twofold increase in the last eight years.”

“These types of issues are not new,” she said. “Visibility, especially for relatively new farmers markets, is crucial.

“The ability to support this market really lies in your hands,” Hanlon-Smith told councilors. “[Allowing a sign] is not something that would just be charitably given. It’s something that would benefit the city overall – economically, socially and in terms of the health of the community overall. I hope you will consider a sign that is worthwhile and visible.”

Mayor Patti Smith, De Angelis’ only apparent ally on the issue, reminded her peers that each had signed a “sustainability resolve” that spoke of support for green initiatives, with specific mention of a farmers market.

“Signing a resolve is one thing, but walking the walk is even more powerful,” she said, calling for a “tasteful and appropriate sign” in hopes that shopping patterns could change enough in the next few years that it can be taken down “because everybody will know where it is.”

“I am all fired up about this,” said Leah Lippmann, president of the Knightville Neighborhood Association, which supports the sign and hopes more farmstand shoppers will translate into more business through the downtown area.

“I think the farmers market is an important part of making the city a vibrant sustainable place to live,” she wrote, in an email. “As a community we need to have a broader view of how this affects our lives. If we lose this farmers market, we are closer to losing the beloved farms in our community to more developments and [increasing] our dependence on foreign foods and goods.

“The farmers market is pretty close to closing if they don't get a sign. They need people to see the signs and change their daily patterns. This can be done if, daily, people are reminded on their way to and from work, the market exists and is at a specific time and place.”

Despite the success of the Scarborough market, others in the area have not done so well. The end of the Windham farmers market, announced three weeks ago, was “tied to very limited support” from the town, De Angelis claimed.

But if De Angelis hopes to get support from other city officials to help convince her fellow councilors of the need to approve a sign for the farmers market, she may not want to look to the Planning Board. Perhaps ironically, a big opponent of the sign is Planning Board Chairwoman Caroline Hendry, whom De Angelis recently convinced to stay on past the expiration of her term in April.

“We have such a mish-mash of signs in the city I can’t believe it,” said Hendry. “Right now, we have no purview over signs and the whole situation is helter-skelter, hit-or-miss, who knows what’s going to go up.”