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I’m pleased to announce that thanks to the efforts of ACC Commissioner Doug Lowry and Rod Bowlden, Deputy Executive Director of the State Properties Commission, we’ve been given a bit of a reprieve and can continue to use the old farmers market facilities for a while longer.

Even with the reprieve, nothing has changed in the long term. The state is still moving forward with selling the property, and unless something changes on that front, we will have to move elsewhere later this year. However, this gives us an opening!

It turns out that an act of legislature is needed to determine the exact boundaries of the property up for sale. There are three state agencies that use the original parcel, and so it’s unclear what is actually “surplus”, and until that gets sorted out, it can’t get sold. This give us the opportunity to show that in fact none of it is surplus.

In my view, ideally the state would transfer the property over to Athens-Clarke County for permanent use as a farmers market and related activities. Other possibilities include the state keeping the deed, but letting ACC, or the local Ag Extension Office, or a non-profit such as P.L.A.C.E. administer its use as a dedicated market facility.

Once that is done, then the property would be eligible for grants from the USDA and other sources to repair the years of neglect and really make the place nice. As I mentioned last week, it could easily support several full farmers markets a week, and give a permanent home to Athens Locally Grown, the Saturday market currently at Bishop Park, and a place for the few remaining local conventional farmers to sell their produce.

Here’s what has to take place for this to happen, and it’ll take your help:

1. ACC needs to be willing to take ownership of the property. They currently lease the property, and have responsibility for it. They have in the past been interested in owning the property, but the state was asking too much money for it. If we can get the state to just hand it over, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the county would still be taking on a liability risk. They would need to be willing to do so.

2. The Department of Agriculture would have to be willing to donate the property to the county, or to hold onto the deed and permanently lease the property to the county or other administering agency. The people I have spoken to there have said they’d love for the property to be used again for its intended purpose. They feel that it is out of their hands, though, since it has already been declared surplus and been handed off to the state properties division. This may be true, but it couldn’t hurt to have them explicitly on our side.

3. An act of legislature will have to take the property off the surplus roster and legally transfer it to the county (or back to the Ag Dept.). This is probably the hardest part, and is what makes this whole thing a long shot. The truth of the matter is the state is severely hurting for money, and in good times this would be a prime piece of real estate for a developer. I think we could show that we’d have a better economic impact for the region over the long term than a quick sale now, but I think it’s safe to say law makers aren’t known for looking at the long term.

So, here’s what you can do. Those of you living in Athens-Clarke County, contact your commissioners and let them know you’d like them to do what they can to secure the property for permanent use as a locally controlled farmers market. Point them to the Anderson Farmers Market for a nearby example of what’s possible.

Write or call the state Department of Agriculture. Their phone number is (404) 656-3645. They have a “Markets Division” which is in charge of all of the state markets. They’ll tell you that it’s out of their hands, but if they knew just how many people wanted this to happen, maybe they’d find a way to get it back in their hands.

Finally, write and call your state representative and senator. This isn’t just about Athens — Athens Locally Grown serves over 30,000 square miles of Georgia, and that covers an awful lot of districts. The farmers aren’t just in Athens, so ALG provides an economic boost for all of NE Georgia. The customers aren’t just in Athens, either, so ALG is helping to feed people across NE Georgia. This is the most critical thing, for someone will have to draft legislation to make this all happen. Even if ACC, the Ag Department, and the governor himself wanted this, it can’t happen without legislation, thanks to the surplus process that started some time ago.

If you’d like some statistics to help you, here’s a few:

  • As best as I can tell, ALG is the largest retail farmers market in the state
  • Nearly 70 growers sell at the market
  • Nearly 1700 households shop at the market
  • About a third of a million dollars of food was sold through the market in 2008
  • By pretty much every metric, the market doubles in size each year
  • ALG is in its eighth year of operation and has operated year-round for the past four winters.
  • The online farmers market model invented by ALG has now been duplicated by 75 other communities across the US (and into Canada & Australia).
  • ALG & Athens, GA is seen by many as a pioneer and an inspiration for successfully incubating and preserving the small family farm

Finally, pass this along to anyone you may know who can also spread the word. Forward this email, or send them to the website, where this email (and every email I send out) is preserved on the “Weblog” page.

Thank you for anything you can do! We have a hard task ahead of us, but now that we’ve been using the old market for the past several months, I can’t imagine using any other space. And I’ve already seen Locally Grown cause legislation to get passed (a sales tax measure in Tennessee that exempted farmers using the LG system from collecting sales tax), so I know it can be done.

Thanks for all of your support. We’ll see you Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old (and hopefully soon to be permanent) market on Broad Street!