Downtown market organizer must share Main Street, become a city ‘ambassador’

City Hall has changed its agreement with the popular Main Street market known as Soda City to carve out access for other Saturday events and to add a behavior provision for its founder.

The new agreement moves Soda City from the 1400 and 1500 blocks of Main Street to the 1600 block – farther from the State House – on four occasions: the Latin Festival, the move-in day for students at The Hub, the Gay Pride parade and the Jam Room Music Festival.

This year’s Latin Festival will be Aug. 27. The SC Pride event is on Sept. 3. The music festival is on Nov. 12. Tenants of the student high-rise generally move in around mid-August.

Soda City has helped invigorate Main Street, supporters say. But it also has drawn resentment from some businesses, especially longtime, established retailers as well as some festival promoters.

New language adopted Tuesday by City Council informs Soda City founder and organizer Emile DeFelice that he must conduct himself as a “positive promoter and de facto goodwill ambassador” or risk losing the deal to use Main Street for his weekend event that draws a few thousand visitors every Saturday.

“Not only are we goodwill ambassadors for the city of Columbia, but we’re promoters,” DeFelice said Thursday.

He said he’s not sure why the goodwill provision was adopted. “I’m glad they chose to formalize it that way. It’s certainly true that we’ve all been irritated from time to time. (But) there hasn’t been a single issue that hasn’t been amicably resolved. ”

Jeff March, president of S.C. Pride, does not recall it that way.

“He’s difficult to work with, and his reputation is well known,” March said. He cites an occasion when DeFelice asked S.C. Pride to reroute its parade so it would go through the 1400 and 1500 blocks of Main where Soda City has operated for 3 1/2 years.

“He pitched such an argument that he got his way,” March said. The following year, S.C. Pride planned to continue the route through Soda City’s market. “He said, ‘Absolutely not.’ So we had to route the parade around him. We’ve had a problem with him ever since.”

Jorge Leon, organizer of the Latin Festival, said he’s unaware of anyone associated with his group having conflicts with DeFelice.

DeFelice said his memory is that an S.C. Pride representative whose name he could not recall told him the organization was worried that “farmers would throw vegetables at them.”

DeFelice moved the market from the Olympia neighborhood in the fall of 2012, which gave the capital city its first downtown market in 60 years.

“We work with anybody who wants to play because everybody benefits,” he said. “Our standing position has always been, ‘the more the merrier.’”

Still, he said of his civic commitment, “I never back down on Columbia. I never back down on Main.”

Soda City on average draws 3,000 to 4,000 people on Saturdays to Main Street, he said. “We bring $5 million in new spending ... to a zone that had none,” DeFelice said of the vast change on weekends to once-abandoned Main Street.

Assistant city manager Missy Gentry said the city is going to start using the “goodwill ambassador” language in other agreements with organizations that want to use city streets.

But the four other agreements that council approved at the same time Tuesday as Soda City’s do not contain that behavior provision. Gentry said she cannot recall if the same provision has been in other such agreements.

“I am aware that with any new event there are growing pains and we’ve worked through those growing pains,” Gentry said.

The new agreement spells out for the first time that Soda City must move on specific days for specific events, she said. “It’s just shifting the two blocks that he can use.”

City Center Partnership, the advocacy organization for the blocks immediately around Main, is aware of tensions between Soda City and some Main Street retailers.

“It was a conflict,” director Matt Kennell said. “There was quite a bit of friction. It’s been fairly quiet recently. There are flare-ups from time to time.”

The rub largely has been between legacy businesses that grew accustomed to customers parking directly in front of their stores on weekends and newer arrivals on the burgeoning street that now has attracts hundreds of pedestrians, shoppers and residents.

“It’s sort of the old guard versus the new guard,” Kennell said. “I think it’s going to all work out. The market has been a real shot in the arm for downtown and it has become a destination.”

Jeremy Becraft, manager of the Mast General store on Main, said, “The debate (about Soda City’s presence) is not as rough and mean as it used to be.”

He said the market has substantially bolstered his store’s success. “It brings a lot of people at once to downtown.”

He would not say whether he knew of the behavior provision. When read to him by a reporter, Becraft said, “That is a pretty bold statement. If you know Emile, he is a pretty bold guy.”

The agreement reads in part, “In the event that organizer fails to act as a positive promoter and de facto goodwill ambassador of the city, the city, at its sole option, may immediately terminate this agreement.”

Mayor Steve Benjamin, perhaps City Council’s most outspoken supporter of Soda City, would not respond when asked about that provision. “I’m excited about the market and the growth of the market,” he said.

DeFelice also points out that Soda City does not seek public money.

“I don’t think anything could be more goodwill than not taking any tax money,” he said. “I think that we have been pretty good citizens and extracted nothing from the public coffer.”

This story was originally published April 7, 2016 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Downtown market organizer must share Main Street, become a city ‘ambassador’."