Cerabino: Palm Beach residents rail over green market 'carpetbaggers' - Palm Beach Post
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Posted: 7:49 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011
This was a week of revelation for green market vendors who had foolishly imagined that they might be worthy to sell their goods in the town of Palm Beach.
"If we're not wanted, that's fine," said Lisa Bottcher, 47, a vendor of homemade dog treats. "But they don't have to call us names."
After spending most of the year flirting with the idea of hosting a green market on the island, Palm Beach officials caved in this week to the public outcry of residents who characterized green market vendors as "carpetbaggers" who would "dumb down" the town and bring in riffraff from across the bridge.
Bottcher's business, Oliver's House, has been selling liver-based dog brownies at the West Palm Beach GreenMarket on Saturdays for 12 years. She and dozens of other vendors had been approached by a marketer to set up tables on Sunday mornings in a Palm Beach parking lot on Peruvian Avenue.
So much for 'doing a service'
"I appreciated being invited," said Bottcher, who was a stockbroker in Palm Beach before she started her small business. "And I thought I was going to be doing a service to a lot of my customers who live in Palm Beach."
The Palm Beach green market idea was hatched by marketer Harry Welsh, who promoted it as a way to bring people into town when businesses were struggling for customers. Welsh recruited about 50 successful vendors from green markets in West Palm Beach and Lake Worth to participate.
"I was imposing restrictions that I thought the town would appreciate," he said.
The Palm Beach green market would ban live entertainment. All the tents would have to be white. And there would be no arts and crafts.
"You don't have to have dancers, a million colors and crafts to have a green market," Welsh said.
He thought his plan was going to sail through.
"I probably spoke to 100 people in Palm Beach and they all told me they were for it," he said.
But at a town Planning and Zoning Commission hearing Tuesday, six of the seven commissioners voted against it after a one-sided barrage of public comments against the idea.
Let the maids go to market
"We have beautiful supermarkets to send our maids to," resident Ruby Rinker told commissioners, according to a report in the Palm Beach Daily News. "If we were starving people that needed discounted food, that would be different. But we just don't need it."
Commissioners wondered aloud about the sort of people who would drift over the bridge for the weekly open-air market.
"It's incredible to find out we're less than what's expected in Palm Beach," said Carolyn Dwyer, who along with her sister, Joanne Polacek, operates Cottage Garden Teas, a loose-leaf gourmet tea business that has been operating at the West Palm Beach GreenMarket for the past five years.
"We're not carpetbaggers," Dwyer said. "We're two women in business and we work hard. We stand outside and we sweat. But we're intelligent and we're educated."
And they have plenty of Palm Beach customers, too, she said.
"We like them a lot," Dwyer said. "They use a lot of organic tea, and they like the finer estate teas."
Ersilia Moreno of Palm Beach Gardens, who closed her accounting practice to start Olive Oil of the World, a specialty olive oil and vinegar business, said she's disappointed but not surprised that Palm Beach got cold feet.
"When Harry approached me, I said, 'Are you sure that Palm Beach is going to let this happen?' "
On Thursday morning, Bottcher sold 18 pounds of her gourmet dog brownies to Palm Beacher Ann Vanneck, who drove to West Palm Beach to stock up on treats for her three Shih Tzus.
Vanneck said it's "stupid" to disparage green market vendors, but she agrees with the decision to keep them from setting up tables in Palm Beach.
"I'm happy to drive over the bridge to the West Palm Beach GreenMarket," Vanneck said. "I spend my Saturdays in the green market. I love my plants, the fish, the cheese, the bread, the vegetables."
So wouldn't it be convenient to have that in Palm Beach?
"I don't see it as a convenience," she said. "A lot of people go to church on Sunday in Palm Beach."
~frank_cerabino@pbpost.com
23 Sep, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGK8rUWrKb9fZfValCf_12TFtoX6g&url=http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/cerabino-palm-beach-residents-rail-over-green-market-1873977.html
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