City Hall’s Bear Market

City administrators are putting sculptures of bears on the medians of Mission Viejo’s thoroughfares. These are taxpayer-funded sculptures that were decorated with mosaic tiles during the weekly farmers market in front of city hall.

The front-page Saddleback Valley News headline on May 24, “A market downturn,” describes city hall’s attempt at hosting a farmers market. Despite constant advertising from city hall, using tax dollars for full-page ads in newspapers and notices in every city publication, the farmers market is shrinking.

The city hall parking lot marketplace is a short distance from Trader Joe’s and Ralphs. Mission Viejo residents drive past at least one major food store to get to city hall. In addition to the farmers market having no visibility from the street, its patrons have trouble finding a parking place. City hall has 240 employees, and changing the market date from Friday to Saturday morning added library patrons to the competition for parking space.

City administrators added traffic but not enough real customers by turning each farmers market into a circus. E.g., unrelated activities included a simultaneous health fair, band concert, safety expo, crafts event and decorating bears.

SVN’s May 24 story gave the impression the market is declining because of changing the day from Friday to Saturday, and that’s false. It was also dwindling on Friday. As one aspect of its decline, city administrators attempt to pump up city events by exaggerating attendance figures, plus pressuring city employees to attend. Additionally, city hall has a cadre of groupies who appear on command at city events. Groupies might be into decorating bears, but they apparently aren’t buying anything.

Despite vendors pulling out, city administrators have succeeded at absorbing the time of many employees. Orchestration of the hoopla (bands, health fair, safety expo, art and crafts, etc.) takes an immense amount of staff time, which city hall doesn’t account for. When the market ends, city administrators will create another time-absorbing activity to make 240 employees look busy.

A responsible council majority could stop city hall’s parties and hold the city manager accountable. Voters’ next opportunity to change the council majority is November 2014.