KCC farmers market ponders possible Sunday expansion

KAIMUKI—The wildly popular Saturday farmers market at Kapiolani Community College (KCC) has been looking into expanding to Sundays. The plan for this test market idea has been presented at three neighborhood boards within the surrounding community, where representatives from the KCC and the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation (HFBF) sought the public’s reaction to the idea.

The most comprehensive presentation was given at the Kaimuki Neighborhood Board on July 21. There, Grant Hamachi from the HFBF and Carol Hoshiko from KCC provided a brief background on the longstanding relationship between the HFBF and the KCC’s Culinary Institute of the Pacific. The HFBF is a non-profit organization of farming families united for the purpose of analyzing problems, formulating action to ensure the future of agriculture, and promoting the well-being of farming.

KCC has been hosting its Saturday market since 2003. An expansion of the market could be viewed as a way to further promote local produce in the marketplace.

The present plan is to test the Sunday market sometime this fall. The KCC and HFBF are trying to determine a good start date and time for the market.  Other pending questions include which vendors would participate and how the success of this test market would be measured.

There is currently a waiting list for vendors at the KCC market. In theory, not all current vendors would attend both days, thereby opening up some slots to those on the waiting list. For those who could come both days, the Sunday market would provide additional opportunities for revenue. In both cases, an expansion would help Oahu’s farming economy. What is hard to predict is how much more consumer traffic the additional day would attract and by what criteria the test market would be judged to be viable. The test market is also intended as a way to work out any problems that could result from an expansion. 

Although the proposed expansion has many supporters, there are also numerous community concerns being taken into consideration. Most of the apprehensiveness relates to traffic congestion in the area. The Saturday market consistently consumes all of the available parking on campus, the Diamond Head Theater’s lot, and much of the street parking in the surrounding area. The fear is that adding a Sunday market will create a similar parking shortage on Sundays, when it will compete with other events such as the New Hope services at Diamond Head Theater, various races and fun runs that tend to take place on Sundays, as well as frequent festivals at Kapiolani Park that have historically used the KCC parking lot as a pick up site for shuttle services.  The challenge is to determine a time for the market that would pose the fewest conflicts with these other events.

As of The Hawaii Independent’s discussion with Hoshiko on August 19, no start date for the fall has been determined and the KCC and HFPF are continuing to take all of the public’s questions and concerns into consideration. 

For more information, visit http://www.hfbf.org or contact the HFBF at [email protected] or (808) 848-2074.