The Madison Public Market was a project started on my watch as mayor over a decade ago and it was a personal priority for me. So, it hurts to write this, but Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway is right. This is the wrong time to move forward with the current plan.
Some quick history. A 2010 consultant’s report recommended that the market be located downtown because it required a lot of nearby foot traffic to be successful. After sifting through the available sites, the consultant recommended the block of Pinckney Street between Doty and Wilson streets, where the soon-to-be demolished Government East parking ramp sits today.
I actually conceived the market as the centerpiece of a major redevelopment I dubbed Public Market Square. The idea was to have the market, a new hotel to serve Monona Terrace that would include a renovated Madison Municipal Building converted to be a grand entrance to the hotel, a new underground parking ramp, a bus transit center, a new city office building, and the train station for the new Madison to Milwaukee and Chicago passenger line all within a three block redevelopment.
It would have been a beautiful thing and it was close to happening. Then everything went to hell. Scott Walker was elected governor in November 2010 and wasted no time in giving away over $800 million in federal money to build the rail line. A few months later I lost my reelection bid and new Mayor Paul Soglin reimagined the whole project, kicking out the market altogether and rechristening it Judge Doyle Square.
Here we are a decade later and JDS is still limping along, less than half completed with the final elements still in doubt.
The market started a nomadic journey as Mayor Soglin insisted that it should be out in an under-served neighborhood instead of where consultants said it needed to be. After years of more deliberation the city settled on the city-owned fleet services building at the corner of First and Johnson streets. That site has virtually no foot traffic and few of the characteristics that the consultants said were vital to the market’s success.
In fact, the 2010 report considered two other sites in that general area, the Mautz Paint site and Union Corners, both on East Wash. But the report concluded, “The Mautz Paint site and Union Corners are much weaker sites (than Government East) in large part because they are not located in the dense residential and employment areas downtown that are critical to strong sales and would not fulfill the current Madison Public Market goals.” That same criticism applies to the fleet services site.
And if it’s equity you’re after, then a site on South Park Street makes a whole lot more sense.
But I have to question the whole idea of a market as having much to do with equity. For one thing, markets tend to be rather expensive places to buy food. They’re not really about providing fresh foods to food desert communities. For another thing, a market could well result in the gentrification of a neighborhood, pushing lower-income residents out. Finally, if you want to provide space for diverse vendors — as this market does — well, that can be done at any location. In short, providing food oases in food deserts is a great goal but a public market is a really inefficient, expensive and maybe even counter-productive way to address it.
Former Madison Ald. Dave Ahrens made these and other points rather forcefully in a piece in Isthmus last year. While I disagree with Ahrens’ overall conclusion that the whole concept is wrong, he makes some valid points.
So, while it’s a sort of classic Madison move to hit the restart button after over a decade of deliberations and hard work, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if this market concept was put on ice and a new concept was developed at a better location after we see how the pandemic changes the retail landscape.
Market proponents are bitterly disappointed over the mayor’s move to put this project on hold. They have every reason to be. They’ve worked hard to make an awkward site work, they’ve developed detailed plans and they’ve gotten commitments for the private fundraising goals the city required. If I were them I wouldn’t want to see all that good work go for naught either.
But the mayor has to be realistic. She’s confronting a massive $25 million budget shortfall for next year and nobody can predict how long the pandemic will last or for how many years the budget damage will reverberate. And there is also no predicting how all this will impact consumer behavior long term. All the assumptions on which the market is based are now subject to second guessing.
So, while it’s true that the current plans for the market call for no city subsidy beyond tax incremental financing (which, in theory, the market itself would pay back through higher property values surrounding it — an indication, by the way, that the market actually counts on gentrification), Rhodes-Conway’s concern that the city might end up subsidizing its operating costs are more than valid.
It’s also important that the mayor set the right tone. At a time when the city is struggling even to provide basic services, do we really want to send the signal that we’re going to keep pursuing what the mayor calls “a shiny object”?
Next to the people who worked hard to make this specific concept work, I was as invested in it and I believe in its value as much as anyone in the city. But the mayor’s right. The responsible thing to do is to put the project on hold.
