Moorpark Chamber Cancels Plan for Weekly Farmers’ Market : Shopping: Officials cite the City Council’s concerns about safety and unfair competition and the lack of support from downtown merchants.

Citing a lack of support among city officials and High Street merchants, the Moorpark Chamber of Commerce said Tuesday that it is dropping plans for a weekly farmers’ market aimed at attracting shoppers to downtown Moorpark.

“I think the whole problem was a lack of guts in moving ahead with this thing,” chamber President Francis Okyere said. “When it came time for people to step forward and take some accountability and responsibility for making this move, the chamber was standing there by itself.”

Chamber officials had sought city approval for the market last summer and had hoped that the Saturday afternoon event, featuring fresh fruits, vegetables, breads and other products, could make its debut in September.

But while expressing broad support for the idea as a way to focus attention on Moorpark’s sleepy downtown shopping district, City Council members quickly raised objections ranging from unfair competition with existing businesses to safety concerns over the chamber’s desire to hold the event in the parking lot of the city’s Metrolink station.

Council members Bernardo Perez and Pat Hunter were asked to meet with chamber officials and downtown merchants to see if they could work through the individual criticisms.

After nearly four months of meetings and behind-the-scenes negotiations--including one particularly stormy public session during which merchants criticized the proposal--the chamber’s board of directors voted unanimously Thursday to abandon the plan.

Okyere this week officially notified council members of the decision in a round of phone calls and a letter from the chamber.

“I guess I’m a little disappointed,” Perez said shortly after hearing of the decision. “I think a farmers’ market is a wonderful idea for Moorpark and particularly for High Street.”

Perez said the City Council is at least partly responsible for letting a good idea die.

“We need to step up and shoulder our responsibility,” Perez said. “We should have been an equal supporter with the chamber in making this happen, and we didn’t do it. Maybe next time around, we will.”

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But Mayor Paul Lawrason was reluctant to accept blame for failing to get behind an idea that he said was not sufficiently worked out when the chamber sought city approval.

“They put us to the gun, and we were supposed to react and make it positive and make it work,” Lawrason said. “I think it might have been beneficial to cut us in a little bit earlier. I did not back away because of a lack of guts or whatever Mr. Okyere wants to call it. If this was something everybody wanted, by God, we’d do it.”

Under the chamber’s original plan, the market would have been run by Cynthia Korman, who operates the Ojai Certified Farmers’ Market. Plans called for 15 to 20 certified growers to sell items ranging from fresh fruits and vegetables to fish, coffee, plants, bread, pasta, eggs, honey flowers and other items.

In the end, Lawrason said the failure of the downtown merchants to get behind an idea some saw as potentially threatening sealed the fate of this particular version of a farmers’ market--an idea he still supports in theory.

“The chamber and Francis were one proponent of this, and I failed to grasp who in the merchant community were strong proponents,” he said. “There were a lot of negatives bounced around. We heard those and responded to them.”

Joy Cummings, president of the Moorpark Old Town Merchants Assn., said Okyere and chamber officials never addressed her concerns over vendors competing with existing businesses, and the idea of a private contractor running the market for profit and with advantages over other permanent businesses.

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“I think it ran into opposition because the chamber was inviting an independent businesswoman in and asking special favors for her to come in and set up an independent business,” Cummings said. “There’s no way I could back that, even though I think the farmers’ market would have been an incredibly neat thing.”