On Brookline

Gee, how would anyone come to believe that the Town of Brookline had plans to raise the fee it charges the local Farmer’s Market? Maybe it has something to do with this memo from Marge Amster, the Town’s Commercial Areas Coordinator [click here to read].

Seems pretty clear to me that a case was being made to recover the coin lost from meters. And only Selectman Nancy Daly piped up (according to a transcript of the meeting minutes provided by the Town) to say that she saw trouble with the fee increase.

It gets better, though. In an e-mail to a resident protesting the fee increase, Amster writes:

“When the farmer’s market contract came up for renewal this year, (Chief Engineer) Peter Ditto asked the transportation department to calculate the net loss to the town for the market. This was informational for the selectmen and the administration.

Since the farmer’s market lease had remained at exactly the same amount for 7 years, he also indicated that it should have some sort of increase. We jointly agreed it wouldn’t be fair to increase the lease amount only a month before the market was due to open since their budget (with booth fees, etc.) would have already been set expecting no increase. While he agreed to keep the 2007 lease amount the same, he wanted to talk about an increase for 2008, well in advance of next year.

I don’t think there was ever any intention of increasing to anywhere the “full market value.”

How is it that a DPW employee, who doesn’t even live in Brookline, gets to determine what our local farmer’s market ought to be paying to use public property? And how does he get to “jointly agree” to anything?

Better yet, how does Selectman’s Chair Gil Hoy come to the conclusion that talk of a $12 thousand fee increase amounts to a “rumor with no merit?” He was presented the memo on May 22nd (but later had to request a copy from Amster). And according to Amster’s e-mail of July 13th, she still didn’t know where the fee increase was going to come in.

In fact, as part of their analysis on the increase, town employees believed that other farmer’s markets in the areas did not operate on metered lots, so a comparison of other communities was deemed as not feasible. Another resident had to correct town employees on this score, many do operate on metered lots.

I’ll go back to a point I made early on in this fiasco - Peter Ditto and Marge Amster couldn’t possibly have dreamed this up on their own. The mystery is in determining who got this ball rolling. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure it out. But it takes documents to prove the theory, and so far my requests for documents have been only partially complied with.

We’ll press on.