Jennifer Meyers was designing snacks for a yogurt company in Brooklyn, New York when COVID hit.
“I was stuck in this 500-square-foot studio apartment,” Meyers said. “People tell me now it was like an invisible string but I had this overwhelming urge to hop on a plane and go somewhere. I chose Arizona because I had never been here before and I wanted to be somewhere it was warm outside, the weather was cool and I could go hiking.”
Before the end of that trip, she met the man who would become her husband and signed a lease on an apartment in Scottsdale.
So she went back, sold all her stuff, drove across country and started an energy bar company called Earth Sugar by the end of the year.
Her business model included selling her product at the different farmers’ markets in the Valley and the Scottsdale Farmer’s market was the most crucial one because it was the most lucrative one.
Today the majority of her sales come from online orders, but the Scottsdale Farmers’ Market remains so crucial to her business over the last four years that she calls it “my storefront.”
That’s why she was devastated to learn city plans call for tearing down the market, which has been in that location for 15 years, to put up a parking garage.
She’s not the only one upset with the plan.
A group of residents called Save Old Town Scottsdale is collecting signatures to petition to put the garage somewhere else.
They’ve collected about 1,000 signatures a week for the last three weeks using only volunteer signature gatherers.
“We’re very hopeful the council will sober up from being power drunk and do the right thing,” said R.L. Whitmer, who was out gathering signatures for the group at the market April 26.
Whitmer’s personal objection to the garage has more to do with the old mission church across the street as it does the farmer’s market itself.
“I think a three-story garage here is inappropriate primarily because it disrespects the people who built that mission,” he said. “Hispanic families who moved here in the early 1900s wanted their own parish and it took them from 1911 to I think 1933 to finish that because it was all donations, all done by hand. I think the council needs to respect that history because a mission is what I would consider a very sacred building and to blot it out with a three-story garage is a desecration.”
Instead of destroying the farmer’s market, Whitmer said the city should run a trolley to it to help it. He also figures that if the construction of the garage takes very long, it’s going to hurt stores in the area.
The last city council approved putting the $15.2 million garage at First Street and Brown, along with a second, $14.9 million, garage at Sixth Avenue and Stetson Drive in July 2024.
They chose the First Street and Brown Avenue location because it had been listed as a potential spot for the garage in a flyer supporting the 2019 bond, which is paying for the garage.
Some merchants claimed putting the garage anywhere else would be a “bait and switch” tactic on the voters of Scottsdale while city staff noted a garage at Sixth Avenue and Stetson Drive was needed to accommodate the majority of new development in Old Town.
Former mayor David Ortega and current mayor Lisa Borowsky have both called the idea of putting a garage in front of the mission “a monstrosity,” but they have both been outvoted by their respective city council members in trying for a new location.
Borowsky tried to postpone the city council’s Feb. 11 vote to award the $1.6 million design contract for the garage at First and Brown to Chasse Building Team for 30 days to try and find other locations.
That was shot down by the council and led to allegations that Borowsky was trying to get the contract awarded to a different company. Rumors that she was being investigated by Arizona Attorney General’s Office ultimately proved baseless.
Borowsky says she is not working with Save Our Old Town Scottsdale or any other group on the issue. In fact, she says she’s dropped the topic entirely since the Feb. 11 meeting.
Whitmer feels confident he and his group can ratchet up the pressure on the council over the placement of the garage, but Meyer said she sees the writing on the wall.
After talking with city councilwoman Maryann McAllen, she sees no hope of saving the farmer’s market this time around, though she wants to keep history from repeating itself in the future.
“I want to at least talk about how great what we’re doing is (at the market) and how great vendors are because I don’t want the city to come in and kick us out of the next parking lot; pivoting us around and not understanding how important a stable location and a certain location is for the productivity of our businesses. There’s so many other things they can do to invest in us, and help us and support us so I was really surprised to hear a lot of the rhetoric coming out about their ideas about what we’re doing there.”
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