Illustration by Tabi Walters
The Downtown Development Authority’s new development plan includes up to $21 million for improvements to the Ann Arbor Farmers Market. This may come as a surprise, since in 2017, a $1.5 million plan to build a year-round pavilion on a vacant lot facing Fourth Ave. was shelved because of cost.
DDA director Maura Thomson puts the DDA’s overall contribution at $13 million, emphasizing that the concept is speculative. “It’s a price estimate,” she says. “Thirteen million is what DDA could contribute.”
Related
Cold Comfort: Veteran vendors are questioning plans for a new Farmers Market building.
The amount of work required grew in early 2023, when manager Stephanie Stauffer realized the foundation of the building where she worked was eroding. “When that building was deemed structurally unsafe,” says parks deputy manager Remy Long, “it expedited this pre-existing plan and bumped it up” on the priority list.
The office was demolished last summer. With Stauffer and her staff working out of a shipping container, the need for some kind of new building is obvious. But it appears that much of the expanded budget would go to invisible infrastructure: the new plan calls for sustainable energy and stormwater elements.
Related
Market Reenvisioned: “Haven’t they done this before?” Kurt Wilczewski asks. “A couple of times?”
Capturing stormwater can be expensive in a fully developed urban site like the market. Before Lewis Jewelers could build a new store and mini-mall next to Westgate a few years ago, for instance, crews had to excavate the entire site to bury massive underground storage tanks.
Like Thomson, city administrator Milton Dohoney emphasizes that the concept’s price tag depends on yet-to-be-determined plans. “You’re talking about something that’s under a partial structure now,” he says of the market’s Depression-era sheds. “Do we want it to be something a little more elaborate than that? Do we want to have a better set of office facilities? Do we want to have some kind of structure that would allow it to function easily year round?”
Those answers will come through a visioning process expected to start early next year. “Changing or evolving the Farmers Market is not something you want to do frequently,” Dohoney says. “You want to make one smart decision that’s informed by the public before you go forward.”
The first step will be issuing a request for proposals to manage the public engagement process. Long had hoped to do that by year end, but Dohoney says it’s now looking like early 2026.