Malibu Farmers Market vendors hawked fresh produce, flowers and other goods in the parking lot outside Malibu City Hall on Sunday — instead of at the municipal park where they’ve set up stalls weekly for the last three years.
For the city, the move represents a satisfactory but temporary solution to a months-long dispute over the market’s location that came to a head last week.
The market will be allowed to operate in the City Hall lot until it obtains a permit to return to a parking lot at Santa Monica College’s Malibu satellite campus — known to many residents as the Malibu Library lot — where it operated for years.
“Everything went really well. They came to set up the farmers market at the Malibu City Hall parking lot and had a successful farmers market,” city spokesman Matt Myerhoff said in an interview Monday, adding that “everyone went home friends.”
But to the market and some of the people who run its stalls and booths, the last-minute Malibu switcheroo was less than ideal. Debra Bianco, co-founder and president of Cornucopia Foundation, the nonprofit that launched the market nearly three decades ago, hopes to secure a better temporary location by next Sunday.
“At least 30 to 35 vendors didn’t come,” she said of the turnout at the market at City Hall. “It’s a hidden location, like it’s way up a hill, so we didn’t get the foot traffic we usually would have. And it was way too short of notice.”
The prospects for the market had been bleak as of Friday. That’s when the city announced it no longer would be allowed to take place at Legacy Park, where it had been since 2023.
In an emailed statement Friday, the market said it was “shocked and blindsided” by the news.
On Monday, Bianco said that the city should have worked with the market to avoid such a showdown, and she believed the negotiations for a new location had been going well before the sudden announcement.
“Good god, you can see that we’re working on it, No. 1,” she said. “No. 2, to do it right before the weekend, how are we going to tell all the vendors?”
Myerhoff said Friday that the city had been negotiating with Cornucopia about returning to the campus location for weeks, but that the talks stalled because they “won’t sign the paperwork, they won’t agree to do it. … They just want to stay there and they don’t want to accept the fact that it’s against the law.”
The city had permitted the market to operate out of Legacy Park temporarily while work was underway on Santa Monica College’s Malibu campus near City Hall in the civic center area. That work concluded in 2023, meaning the market had overstayed its welcome by around three years, according to Myerhoff.
“We’ve been working diligently to try to get them back onto their longtime home … and the operator of the farmers market, the Cornucopia Foundation, has refused to leave, and that’s illegal,” Myerhoff said Friday. “We just wanted to make it perfectly crystal clear.”
In summer months, the market’s vendors and booths take up about 40% of public street parking in the civic center area, Myerhoff added.
“There’s kids playing in the street, so it’s not safe,” he said. “It’s not equitable, it’s taking resources from the community, local businesses and visitors, and it’s just come to a head.”
The news brought an end to what briefly became a very public dispute over the location of the market, which has been a mainstay of Malibu since 1998, drawing crowds of tourists and locals each Sunday, including celebrities such as Courteney Cox, Austin Butler and LeAnn Rimes.
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