The Park Silly Sunday Market, last summer’s weekly assembly of artisan vendors and street performers on lower Main Street, is under the microscope. Looking to expand hours and space on the street for this year, market organizers are returning to the drawing board, but not just for their own sake. They also must take into account the current scrutiny coming from Old Town’s business community.

The close examination of the event was prompted by a Historic Main Street Business Alliance survey compiled last November. The survey revealed a mixed bag of reviews of last year’s debut market. Several merchants extolled the market for bringing life to the north end of Main Street (“Finally! I feel like lower Main Street isn’t the wicked stepchild of Main Street,” commented one anonymous merchant in the survey). Others, located at the south end of the street, above the hustle and bustle of the event, expressed concern that their profits dipped during market hours. Some claimed a loss of revenue of as much as a 20 percent.

“In the past years, I would do a fair amount of business on Sundays, especially from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.,” countered another merchant, “but that was all but gone once the ‘Silly’ Market started.”

Market organizers faced criticism from a small gathering of Main Street merchants at a Feb. 28 Park City Council meeting. Ken Davis, the president of the Historic Main Street Business Alliance, was among them. He said he felt the data from the survey was being misused and misinterpreted by Silly Sunday Market’s directors: While the directors tout the survey’s 74.5-percent vote in support of the market’s return and the 59-percent assertion that the impact of the market was positive, Davis said the numbers are incomplete. Only 49 merchants responded out of the near 100 members of the Historic Main Street Business Alliance, he argued, and among the survey participants, some opted to skip questions.

“The survey was only a small percent of business owners and was meant merely as a way to begin an intelligent discussion,” he told the Park Record. “We need more time to get a better feel of what’s going on (The survey) was not meant for someone to simply take our numbers and go to town council and utilize them as proof to their argument.”

When he speaks to Main Street merchants individually, Davis claims there is a prevalent feeling that the promise that the Park Silly Sunday Market would bring in new customers to Old Town was only came true for some businesses.

“We were all sold on the idea that the Park Silly Sunday Market was going to bring a lot of new people onto the street,” he explains. “We wanted to help the merchants on the bottom of the street, but it wasn’t supposed to be at the cost of the other merchants A lot of the restaurants were complaining that their lunch business was severely hurt on Sundays.”

Davis estimates nine out of 10 visitors to Main Street on any given day of the week are attracted by business owners’ hard-earned reputation, built over the years, and not the market’s recent appearance. When visitors arrive, usually they spend a few hours on the street, and when that time is spent at the market, it pulls business from Old Town’s shops and eateries, he says. “Most of the merchants 95 percent I spoke with from Heber Avenue and up did not have a positive impact on their business from the market They are, to varying degrees, against the market.”

Rick Anderson, owner of the Eating Establishment, helps to confirm Davis’ point that on Sundays during the market’s season, from June through October, the only traffic he saw was from destination diners.

“For the Eating Establishment and the majority of our businesses, it’s not foot traffic, it’s destination traffic. In other words, customers come to Main Street to have a meal at the Eating Establishment,” he said. “But our experience was, where we saw increases in business other days of the week (relative to last summer’s daily profits), we did not on Sundays during the Silly Market I definitely think that they should expand the market onto the entire street or at least draw foot traffic to the south end.”

However, in the comment portion of the survey, Mike Sweeney, owner of Seasons Day Spa and past president of the Historic Main Street Business Alliance, counters Davis’ and Anderson’s view that the market needs to change to help businesses capture customers. Instead, he urges merchants to take more initiative.

“It is up to each merchant/business person to figure out how to attract foot traffic on Main Street to come to their respective establishment wherever its location,” he wrote in the survey. “I was surprised by the lack of effort on the part of the merchants/businesses to get people into their store, restaurant, etc. The attitude seems to be if I open my door the customer should just walk in and buy my merchandise/goods or services. That is not how it works in the real world you really have to work for that customer.”

Though Sweeney has the good fortune of owning a business that is geographically located at the heart of the market on lower Main Street, he said he observed only Bahnof Sports being proactive about attracting customers the store’s owners held a sidewalk sale. “I did not see any signs on store doors or windows that offered PSSM special to get customers into the store,” he said.

Max Paap, director of sustainability and special events for Park City Municipal, who has been working closely with market organizers and Main Street merchants, remains a little surprised at the turnout of dissatisfied merchants months after the Park Silly Sunday Market survey administered by the alliance.

“We did have a few meetings after the (November) survey and there were very few negative comments,” he recalled. “Then, a group of merchants did come to the council meeting on the 28th and it did sort of contradict the feeling I got from the original survey.”

Since meeting with the merchants, the organizers of the Park Silly Sunday Market “want to make changes and be cognizant of what the HMBA was saying,” Paap reported. “They aren’t interested in just changing it for their vendors.”

In addition to expanding the hours of the market and adding more square footage on the lower most end of Main Street, the organizers plan to present some new measures to Park City Council on March 27 to address the merchants’ concerns about a decrease in foot traffic on upper Main Street

“We’re going to try to encourage people to use China Bridge during market hours,” he said. “We’d like to put up signage so that when people get out of China Bridge, they have a shot at finding Main Street sooner and getting them to walk the street eventually down to the market. We really didn’t do that last year.”

Among other changes the organizers will propose to council is an increase in city services, such as a more dedicated police force, emergency medical technicians, a building official and more city staffers to prevent violations of building codes and other hazards.

Park Silly Sunday Market Executive Director Kimberly Kuehn and Development Director Jewels Harrison could not be reached for comment this week.