JUNE 25, 2009 ISSUE
Farmers’ Market, SAHA, ASU in Tug-of-War Over Parking
The Watauga Farmers’ Market has become increasingly popular, but that success comes with challenges—including parking.
As the Watauga County Farmers’ Market continues to grow in numbers of vendors and customers, parking at the Horn in the West parking lot in Boone has become an increasing problem.
The Town of Boone leases the Horn in the West property to the Southern Appalachian Historical Association (SAHA). SAHA subleases the parking lot to the farmers’ market on Saturdays (and Wednesdays for part of the season) and also to Appalachian State University, which uses the lot as assigned parking for residential students.
Recently, lease negotiations between SAHA, the farmers’ market and ASU have become heated as the market pushes for more parking on Saturdays. Members of SAHA and the farmers’ market president, Joe Martin, appeared before the council on June 18 to voice their concerns.
The farmers’ market season runs from May through October. The market’s peak harvest season is in August, when the students return for the fall semester.
“It’s an absolute disaster” when student cars are parked at Horn on market Saturdays, Martin said. “We need every parking place up there that we can get.”
According to Martin, SAHA had indicated that it would require ASU student vehicles to be removed from the Horn lot from midnight Friday to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday during the market season. In a November 18, 2008 letter to former farmers’ market president Jeff Thomas published on the farmers’ market website, SAHA board of directors chair Nancy Spann indicated that this was indeed the plan.
In more recent negotiations, however, SAHA presented a plan to lease 250 of the 279 parking spaces at Horn to ASU for student parking and that the students’ removal of cars during market hours would not be a requirement. This is fewer than the number of spaces leased to ASU last year, SAHA officials said.
Spann said that ASU has indicated it would be problematic for them to require students to move their cars on Saturdays. But, she said, many students who park in that lot go home or move their cars on the weekends. The new lease will also prevent ASU students from moving their cars to the Horn lot on ASU football Saturdays, she said.
SAHA, which has had its funding from the Town of Boone reduced in the next fiscal year, depends on the lease revenue from ASU, Spann said. The ASU lease for the lot is about $25,000, although that figure could go down once negotiations are over, she said.
The farmers’ market leases the lot for about $4,000.
Barry Sauls, director of parking and traffic for ASU, said he has been a part of the lease negotiations with SAHA but declined to comment at this time.
Spann and SAHA board members Terry Hamilton and Billy Ralph Winkler spoke on behalf of SAHA at the June 18 council meeting.
“Perhaps the farmers’ market problem is uncontrolled growth from within,” Winkler said at the meeting.
Spann suggested that the farmers’ market begin looking for a new space. Council member Liz Aycock asked Martin if moving to a different location would negatively impact the farmers’ market.
“In my experience, moving hurts any business,” said Martin, who also noted that the farmers’ market has capped the number of vendors for the first time in its history. Martin said the market also proposed shuttling market customers from the Boone Mall using AppalCART but that AppalCART turned down that idea.
The three parties had another meeting on June 23.
“We still haven’t come to any major solutions yet, but we are certainly closer to it than we were two weeks ago,” Spann said. “I am confident that we’re going to be able to work something out for this year that everybody can live with. Everybody’s going to have to give up a little something.”
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