Vendors at the Ottawa Farmers’ Market are having trouble adjusting to their new home at Lansdowne Park, with many hoping that the adjustment will be made easier by the upcoming contract negotiations.
“There’s a lot under the surface at a farmers’ market,” says farmer and Ottawa Farmers’ Market vendor, David Mazur-Goulet.
Initially located at Brewer Park, the market moved to Lansdowne last November. However, vendors are finding that there isn’t as much traffic as they were used to at Brewer Park and their sales have gone down.
Kyle White is a farmer and vendor who has been at the new location since last November, and he says he’s noticed a decrease in both sales and customers. “We’re definitely finding that this crowd may be a little bit of a ‘tourist crowd,’” he says. “We sample cheese, so you can always tell if we’ve gone through a lot of samples and haven’t sold a lot of cheese,” White says. “But at Brewer Park, the people who were there were there to buy their groceries.”
“I feel like a lot of people avoid it [the market] because it’s Bank Street. So we may have to come up with something different. I still have a lot of hope and expectation that this market is going to do well,” says White.
Adding to vendor uncertainty, the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group at Lansdowne cut the market’s hours on Aug. 30 for a football game being held at Lansdowne. OSEG gave the vendors’ five days’ notice that they would need to pack up by 1 p.m. the following Sunday, rather than the regular 3 p.m. With many of the vendors participating in a Savour Ottawa event, it took extra effort to pack up on time.
For Mazur-Goulet, the biggest issue was the short notice. “Even for me, as a small farm, it was too short notice for me to find help so that I could participate in the harvest table and take down my booth in time,” he says.
According to Andy Terauds, the OFM President, the shortened hours caused “quite a bit of confusion and chaos.” He added that the market had never had their hours shortened at Lansdowne before.
“For other events we’ve lengthened our hours, and it’s worked out well with the city,” Terauds says. “We’re negotiating with the city to make sure that the best solution is used, not some arbitrary solution.”
Terauds added that during a final licence agreement with the city made a little over a year ago, it was agreed that “only events of national, provincial or of major significance to the city would require us to close.” Events such as football, hockey, or soccer games were “not going to be a part of that equation . . . This was a change from that and we’re not in agreement with that change,” Terauds says.
Lansdowne representatives did not get back to Centretown News before press time, despite repeated attempts for comments.
Contract negotiations between the market and the city are expected to begin this month and be completed by February 2016.