The Gift That Failed
The Libra Foundation has failed to manage the late philanthropist Elizabeth “Betty” Noyce’s gift to the public in a financially sustainable way. Now, after just seven tumultuous years, it intends to make the hugely unprofitable Portland Public Market available to a private buyer as part of a mega-package of downtown real estate that could sell for a local-record-breaking $65 million-plus.
The market’s new owner would be free to turn it into something inconsistent with, or even antithetical to, Noyce’s vision of a place where Maine people can buy and sell Maine products. In fact, the market’s dire fiscal situation will compel the new owner to make major changes. It might even be cheaper to demolish it and rebuild.
To allow that sale to happen would be irresponsible not only to vendors in the market and their employees, but to the public at large, the recipient of Noyce’s beautiful, generous gift.
Libra should be actively working with market vendors, listening to customers, and consulting with experts and community leaders to find ways the market can be saved in a form consistent with at least some aspects of Noyce’s vision.
It was encouraging to read Friday in the Portland Press Herald that Libra’s four-member Board of Trustees is willing to “discuss,” apparently amongst themselves, a petition from vendors and customers asking them to do just that: save the market.
A good next step would be for the board to talk to the vendors face-to-face, rather than through Press Herald business reporter Tux Turkel.
But that’s probably been the single biggest problem with the market all along: Libra’s dysfunctional relationship with the vendors it supposedly built the market to support.
“The Libra Foundation has treated us with a level of disdain that bordered on contempt,” said Bill Milliken, co-owner of Maine Beer and Beverage, one of the market’s few remaining original tenants.
How else do you explain the bizarre way Libra handled news of the market’s sale?
They tell Tux before they inform their tenants at the market. Then, the night before they know the big news will hit the front page, they send someone around to each vendor’s cash register (under cover of darkness, I assume, given the market’s hours) to deposit an envelope with a note announcing the sale: “As you may have read in this morning’s paper…”
That’s not just contemptuous. That’s creepy.
The vendors agree Libra shouldn’t be in charge anymore, but that doesn’t mean the Foundation should cut its financial support of the market. That is, cut it further — last year’s cuts essentially eliminated the market’s management infrastructure and marketing activities, the facility’s two largest operating expenses, further eroding business and management-vendor relations a year before the operation becomes a real estate investment.
The market is a multi-million-dollar drain on the Foundation’s $300 million trust, but there were, and still are, ways to responsibly reduce the flow of red ink. The tenants who’ve managed to survive and even thrive in the market for the past seven years, like Milliken, are a good source of productive ideas. It’s high time Libra started listening to them.
“This could be an amazing place with the right inspiration” at the management level, said Kris Horton of K. Horton’s Specialty Foods, also an original and successful tenant.
The rub is, a constructive discussion of ways the market can be saved will involve an honest accounting of how it got to this sorry state on Libra’s watch. That won’t be a flattering story for Libra, and it’s clear they’re not anxious to tell it, but it deserves to be told. The first step in finding a solution is admitting there’s a problem. Libra just admitted there’s a problem for the first time, then said it’s pursuing a solution that will likely lead to the market’s demise.
That’s not philanthropy. That’s called “screwing people.”
Libra shrugged off every implication that the market was in trouble until it announced its sale via the Press Herald. Now we’re finally learning some telling details through Libra’s latest comments to the daily, like the fact rents don’t cover even half the market’s basic operating expenses.
Libra’s Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Jere Michelson hasn’t returned calls from The Bollard. He told Tux last week that “vendors don’t seem to recognize that their rents fail to cover even half the cost of operating the 37,000-square-foot structure” [that’s Tux’s paraphrase].
Vendors who read our Jan. 22 story about the market’s fate can be excused for not recognizing that fact.
“We’re really quite comfortable with the way things are going,” Wells told me last month. Two longtime tenants (El Mirador and Stone Soup) were leaving or had already left at the time, but Wells said a new Vietnamese restaurant was coming into the market, and there was already interest in Stone Soup’s space.
The market has “suffered no vacancies for very long,” said Wells. “We’re really pleased with that.”
If the market’s consistently full or nearly full, but the rents Libra is charging tenants don’t cover even half its basic operating costs, someone on the Foundation’s staff is a really shitty accountant, right?
Not exactly. These people aren’t stupid, just stubborn.
Wells knew the market wouldn’t make a dime even before it was built. “We didn’t design it to make money,” Wells told the daily in December of 1999. “Nobody would spend $9.3 million on a public market if they ever expected to make money. We did it to provide a venue for Maine products to be sold.”
And when independent vendors repeatedly failed at the market under Libra’s rules and management regime, Libra basically sold those products itself through non-profit entities like Farm to Market Inc., which set up in-house businesses with names like Bayside Meats and Maine Harvest in the vacant stalls.
These Libra-backed vendors were supposed to be placeholders of sorts who’d make way for independent vendors if and when they came along to rent the stalls. But even now, Libra-supported tenants are the market’s primary purveyors of produce (Gillespie Farms, part of the Pineland complex Libra owns) and meat (Maverick’s Butcher Shop). The market-run Maverick’s Family Steakhouse, the biggest restaurant on the premises, occupies an entire wing of the building.
Could these market-run businesses have something to do with the huge imbalance between rent revenue and expenses? Together they occupy a third or more of the market floor. How much do they return to Libra in rent or revenue?
If these businesses are not contributing revenue or attracting shoppers, why not make their space available to the steady stream of entrepreneurs willing to fill vacancies and pay rent, the ones Wells was so pleased about just last month?
Vendors past and present have complained that Libra’s rigid vision of what the market should look like makes it unnecessarily difficult for them to succeed there.
In 2000, several original tenants told Casco Bay Weekly that the market’s inflexibility and obsession with rules and appearances hurt their businesses and failed to attract customers. Wolfe’s Neck Farm, the non-profit Freeport outfit that raises natural beef, lasted 15 months in the market and lost $184,000, the late Peter Cox told the weekly that year.
The market “was started with a very distinct plan,” Cox said. “We felt after a while that original vision had to be modified to attract people down there to eat lunch, to break the mold and be innovative, and that wasn’t about to happen.”
Actually, that did happen eventually, but not before Wolfe’s Neck and others took a bath and got out while they still had their shirts. The market’s management was either too slow or unwilling to adjust in order to keep well-known early tenants like Wolfe’s Neck and Smiling Hill Farm. Tenants kept failing, scandals and internal strife mounted, and Libra kept shrugging off bad news and criticism until it just gave up.
Now, with the market on the verge of extinction, the Foundation has one last chance to work with its tenants and the community to keep some semblance of the Portland Public Market alive.
After Smiling Hill Farm’s stall failed in the market, farmer Warren Knight made comments to CBW that Wells and company should take to heart. Knight wasn’t bitter about his experience. “It’s a public market. It’s a gift bestowed upon the city, and it’s public,” Knight said. “And as such, the public will decide how that space is going to be used.”
If only that were true.
— Chris Busby
Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard.
