2008-03-06 THILOFARMERS MARKET - Laserfiche WebLink

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th for Hilo in the last 20 years. We’ve been in Hilo, well, this is our 20 year and we have over 200 plus vendors. A lot of them are local agricultural farmers, backyard growers, hobbyists, food vendors, and crafters. And so it brings a lot of colorful life and diversity to Downtown on those two days, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And I guess one of the things that’s driving me to get this structure up has been the desire to improve upon what we already have as a market as well as a Downtown community. We don’t have bathrooms, or we didn’t have bathrooms – well, actually we had one bathroom when I first got here and took over the market in ’99, and that was across at the bus station at Mooheau Bandstand. Since then we’ve added 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 bathrooms. And so, you know, a lot of the people, the vendors as well as the customers, appreciate the bathrooms. But even more with this new structure we hope to bring in more bathrooms so that it makes the shopping experience and the market and Downtown a more pleasurable and safer environment and comfortable. So I think that’s what we’re trying to do here, is just make things a little more better for something that’s already good in the community, and hopefully make it better for the next 20, 30 years. IWASHITA: I know Pike’s Place Market is a permanent structure. Have, do other places you mentioned, were they all permanent buildings that the farmers markets were housed in? DELA CRUZ: Well, the one that I liked the most was Grandville Island and Vancouver and it had a mix of both. They had permanent structures and they also had tents or tarps and also just, you know, no tarps at all. And so we’d like to model that market in the respect that on this Phase I will be permanent structure, and then across the street and kitty corner to that would be tarps and tents. Eventually we’d like to replace those with more durable structures, maybe tents or maybe even other solid structures like what we’re proposing today. IWASHITA: Thank you. DELA CRUZ: You’re welcome. Thank you. WATANABE: Okay, do we have any -? MELROSE: Could I add two quick thoughts to that response? WATANABE: Yes. MELROSE: One is that, just understand that in comparison to other markets around the country, one of the unique things about the Hilo Farmers Market is -, many of the other markets are public markets, they’re actually on public streets, managed by public contract in public facilities. So the fact that this is a private one gives it an interesting kind of quasi-public, quasi- private sense. The public feels very much a part of this market. And we’re running a business that is in fact feeling like a public place. That’s an honor at some level and it’s also an interesting challenge from a liability perspective. But it is in fact not unique in the country by any means but it’s in the minority of the markets that are around the country. The one other thing I wanted to mention, Andrew, Mr. Iwashita, was that the other comments that we’ve heard from follow-up conversations and even our last meeting with Envision folks is -- we’re aware that people look at the drawings that have been produced and say, you know, this building is big EXHIBIT B 12