Milwaukee Public Market

If the City of Eau Claire ends up pursuing a public market, it shouldn’t be a traditional large-scale public market nor should it be in the Cannery District on the west bank of the Chippewa River.

Those are among the preliminary recommendations of a consultant, Ted Spitzer of Market Ventures Inc., who was hired by the city and who is expected to present a full report to the City Council by the end of September.

Associate city planner Ned Noel said Spitzer addressed the question of whether Eau Claire could support the kind of year-round, multi-vendor indoor public market found in larger cities such as Milwaukee. “Based off of all of his research, he said it’s not a winning strategy,” Noel said.

Several factors make that kind of market challenging in Eau Claire, Noel noted. First, with just under 68,000 people, there simply aren’t enough shoppers in the city to make the market viable. Second, there isn’t enough disposable income in town, either.

Eau Claire shoppers have a frugal mentality, which makes the often higher-priced foods found at a public market a harder sell, Noel noted. Furthermore, there is a plentiful supply of cheap foods available at existing supermarkets to meet consumers’ demands, he said.

Eau Claire shoppers have a frugal mentality, which makes the often higher-priced foods found at a public market a harder sell, Noel noted. Furthermore, there is a plentiful supply of cheap foods available at existing supermarkets to meet consumers’ demands, he said.

As part of the research, meetings were conducted with vendors and food entrepreneurs, and such suppliers offered only noncommittal support for a public market, Noel said. Few of them wanted to be involved in retailing from the more permanent, brick-and-mortar space a public market would provide.

If you were a big fan of the idea of a public market, all of this is the bad news. So here’s the good news. Spitzer, the consultant, believes there are enough assets – including farmers markets, brewpubs, farm-to-fork restaurants, etc. –  in Eau Claire to do something that will help coalesce and expand the city’s food scene. Noel says the consultant has recommended creating a “market district” downtown that would brand the neighborhood around food and culture. Part of this could be a hybrid public market that would be driven by private entrepreneurs instead of public spending.

“It’s pretty bold,” Noel said of the concept of a market district, “and I think we’re still wrestling with what it all looks like.”

The consultant’s preferred site for such a development is an area known as Block 7 – currently a city-owned parking lot at the corner of Wisconsin and North Barstow streets. The city’s Redevelopment Authority owns the block and is seeking a private developer to build there. A market-oriented development could involve a grocery store, a restaurant that also housed vendors, or any number of other related combinations of food-related businesses, Noel said.

The Cannery District – the name given to a largely vacant former industrial area north of Madison Street along the Chippewa River – was initially considered an appealing site for a public market because of its history (there were canneries there decades ago) as well as because of the hope it could be a catalyst for reviving the neighborhood in much the same way as the Eau Claire Downtown Farmers Market was for the North Barstow area. The city’s Redevelopment Authority, which owns much of the property in the district, is still formulating a long-term vision for the neighborhood, and the consultant’s report may impact that, said Mike Schatz, the city’s economic development administrator.