Why is it taking so long to set up a market?

I’ve talked to a lot of people about setting up the market and people are always surprised that it is not as easy as they thought!  Why is it taking us so long to get going?  Here's a couple of reasons:

1.  We need consent from the City Council.  This process is going to cost us in the region of $10,000 (and no that is not a mistake!) in council fees and planning costs.  Clearly, we are not going to make enough money out of the market as is is currently running to pay for that, so we need to convince any potential funders that this market is a going concern.
   Applying for funding takes a lot of time – not so much for writing the applications, but for waiting until decisions are made.  It usually takes a couple of months for these decisions to come out and if you miss out (as we have recently), then you have to start again and find another suitable funder, make an application and wait to hear a decision.  Until we have the money, we can’t really get going because a large part of the money is needed to pay the planners who can help us put our application together.
2. Before we can even apply for consent we need to find a long term home – and we need to be sure about it because consent is granted for a site, and if we need to shift sites, then we need to get another consent.
   St Luke’s Church cannot be that home because, as many of you will know, the parking around there is terrible, and there is no way that we would get consent to do a weekly market on any site on State Highway 1.
   The CCC consent team have told us to avoid CCC public land because doing so means a lot more hoops to jump through, and the costs go up as well. They recommend a school site or something similar.
   So we are interested in using one of the schools in the area as a site for the market. At this stage, we are waiting until Halswell School can be in the running because we think that perhaps this would be our best bet, if they are up for it. At the moment, they are not, because of the building that is still going on there.

Having run a few markets last year, we now know that we can run a market, although we are not getting the numbers that might make us thinkg we could do it weekly at this stage.  To be convinced we need to see good numbers turning up this year.  Good numbers also would encourage us to continue putting in the work and energy needed to do this.
So please, do make the effort to come along and to tell your friends about it and get them along too.  The more people that come, the better the range of vendors will be which will make the market more varied and fun.  If we are to pull this off, your active support is critical!