Kudos to Steve Bowman.

Even though it wasn’t on the agenda, some thought must have been given to a vote by the outgoing Smithfield Town Council at its December meeting to spend $1.4 million on a new Farmers Market at the planned Grange at 10Main development on the former Pierceville property. Bowman, a supporter of the project, nixed any such sneakiness by declaring during council members’ comments at the beginning of the meeting that the will of the voters should be heeded and a decision deferred until a newly elected council takes office in January.

The mayor was referring to an emphatic election outcome that saw a slate of candidates opposed to rapid residential growth displace two incumbents and flip the balance of power on the seven-member board.

A motion to approve the Farmers Market funding could not have passed without Bowman’s support, since at least three council members – Grange opponents Jeff Brooks, Bill Harris and Mike Smith – would almost certainly have voted against it.

Bowman cited, in part, a desire by Grange developer Joseph Luter IV to meet with the new council, as stated in a Nov. 26 letter in which he said he told Smith that the project, including 267 residences, a hotel and retail space, could not go forward without the Town Council’s support.

Luter’s meeting with the new council is one of several essential steps if he wants widespread public support for the Grange generally and a new Farmers Market specifically. The mood of the electorate suggests there’s much work to be done. 

We recommend, in no particular order of importance:

• A Town Hall-style meeting at which Luter and his team listen carefully to citizens. We offered to host and moderate just such a forum in the spring of 2023, when citizen opinions were being formed, but Bowman declined to participate, followed by others in town government, then Luter, who told us he wouldn’t participate unless town officials did. The focus of Luter at the time was simply finding enough votes on the Planning Commission and Town Council to get the property rezoned. That eventually occurred in a 3-2 council vote last December, the final straw for an electorate already angered by town approval of the massive Mallory Pointe residential development off Battery Park Road.
• A feasibility study that explores, among other important considerations, how existing Farmers Market customers feel about the new facility; whether it would attract new customers; what effect, positive or negative, it would have on downtown merchants and, in turn, the downtown retail economy; and what vendor fees would have to be charged to support a permanent, year-round market.
• A written plan by the Isle of Wight County Economic Development Authority, which voted recently to own the new Farmers Market, despite concerns by one of its members that the plan for doing so is way too vague. The time for details on how this public-private partnership would be structured is now. We were stunned when Isle of Wight County supervisors voted unanimously last month to send the EDA $1.4 million without a written agreement in place. The new Town Council won’t make the same mistake.