Squeezing the Tomatoes.
By Jim Conley • Jul 16th, 2007 • Email This Post to a Friend •
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Get ready for the town hall spin on the farmer’s market debacle [see previous post]. It will likely go this way: “We’re not imposing a $14,000 fee on the farmer’s market, we just did an analysis of how much coin was lost from meters in the Centre Street Parking lot. We’re still negotiating the contract.”
Tomato…Tomahto. Let’s call the whole thing off.
Unless the idea to analyze parking revenue came to town employees in a dream, it was done for the purpose of pricing the 2008 contract. Once the analysis is communicated to the other party, it has the effect of becoming the Town’s position. And the Town’s position is $14 thousand for the 2008 season.
Now, if managers with the Town of Brookline - who purchase tens of millions in goods and services - don’t understand that point, we’re screwed.
The sad reality is that Brookline Town Government is in no position to lose $14 thousand in coin from parking meters and they’ve tried to put it on the backs of farmers; and to the peril of the most significant community event in this town. At the current fee of $2,300 per season, the Town has already placed a burden on the market.
The fact is that the director of the farmer’s market believes she is attending a meeting tomorrow (with the Town’s chief engineer) to save her event [see TAB story].
The town administrator and the selectmen can spin it all they like, but when they went down to the farm they came back smelling like @#$%.
Jim Conley is publisher of On Brookline.
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It’s too bad that the BOS and EDAB did not do a similar cost/benefit analysis when the Webster Street hotel deal was structured. The road repairs/renovations that the developer paid for mostly benefited the developer with the hotel’s needs. But the Town toadies treated this as an advanced payment of ground rent. Wasn’t this a subsidy to the hotel developer? The Town gets paid in the dark for ground rent over the long remaining life of the ground lease. So the BOS and EDAB are all for “Hotel Aid” subsidies but not “Farm Aid” that provides more pleasure to more Town residents and taxpayers than does the hotel. In effect, the BOS surrendered millions with the Webster Street ground lease and now seeks pennies from farmers. There’s a very big financial spread that this proposed rent increase will not recover. The BOS members are part-timers who may be devoting, if I can be generous, their brains part-time to Town matters. So perhaps it if parting time in 2008 for two Selectmen; but don’t worry about them though, as they have their legal careers to fall back on. The farmers will have other venues to sell their produce, unless other communities follow Brookline’s new version of its exceptionalism. So the losers would be many of us who enjoy fresh, locally grown produce, particularly residents who may lack the mobility and/or funds to go to Boston, Cambridge, Newton, etc, for their farmers’ markets. I can just see the Selectmen and the Town Administrator “Dough-si-dough-ing” at the next BOS meeting. They will probably send EDAB the assignment to check out Allandale Farm. How many acres there can be developed to increase the commercial tax base of our Town?
The fact is that the Selectmen already voluntarily toss away some $50,000 in parking meter fees and fines annually by declaring a Saturday parking meter moratorium at the misguided request of the Chamber of Commerce each holiday season, even though this all day free parking is bad for business since it lessens parking turnover. But the C of C is probably ambivalent at best about the Farmer’s Market, which takes up commercial parking spaces and competes with local food merchants, and certain C of C members might be happy to see the Farmer’s Market go belly up. Not that any of our Selectmen feel obliged to honor the preferences of the C of C, heaven forbid.
How it works in Brookline…
After they chase away the Farmers Market by demanding $14,000, the EDAB and Selectmen will pay $50,000 to a consultant for a study on how to attract small and locally-owned businesses to the town.
And then …
They will give the land where the Farmers’ Market used to be to a developer, so they can build something really big, in order to “revitalize” Coolidge Corner.
And then …
After losing the Farmers’ Market AND the parking lot, they hire another consultant for $50,000 to study the parking shortage problem.