Turf drama sends celeb favorite Malibu Farmers Market packing to City Hall parking lot

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Set us as preferred Malibu Farmers Market vendors hawked fresh produce, flowers and other goods in the parking lot outside Malibu City Hall on Sunday — instead of at the municipal park where they’ve set up stalls weekly for the last three years.For the city, the move represents a satisfactory but temporary solution to a months-long dispute over the market’s location that came to a head last week.The market will be allowed to operate in the City Hall lot until it obtains a permit to return to a parking lot at Santa Monica College’s Malibu satellite campus — known to many residents as the Malibu Library lot — where it operated for years.“Everything went really well.

They came to set up the farmers market at the Malibu City Hall parking lot and had a successful farmers market,” city spokesman Matt Myerhoff said in an interview Monday, adding that “everyone went home friends.”But to the market and some of the people who run its stalls and booths, the last-minute Malibu switcheroo was less than ideal.Debra Bianco, co-founder and president of Cornucopia Foundation, the nonprofit that launched the market nearly three decades ago, hopes to secure a better temporary location by next Sunday.“At least 30 to 35 vendors didn’t come,” she said of the turnout at the market at City Hall.

“It’s a hidden location, like it’s way up a hill, so we didn’t get the foot traffic we usually would have.And it was way too short of notice.”The prospects for the market had been bleak as of Friday.

That’s when the city announced it no longer would be allowed to take place at Legacy Park, where it had been since 2023.In an emailed statement Friday, the market said it was “shocked and blindsided” by the news.On Monday, Bianco said that the city should have worked with the market to avoid such a showdown, ...