The club, which owns the Riccarton Sunday Market through its charitable trust, is having a barbecue meeting with stallholders after the market on Sunday to discuss their concerns.
The market at the Riccarton Park racecourse has been operating since 1989.
At least eight stallholders have stopped turning up to the market over the past few weeks, unhappy over invoicing changes and the new monthly car boot market which has started at the market site.
Riccarton Rotary Charitable Trust trustee Renee Walker acknowledged the concerns of some stallholders and said the trustees want to have more conversations with them about how to address any problems.
She is leading the interim management.
Disgruntled stallholders have spoken to The Star on the condition of anonymity saying the new invoicing system is costing them more and the car boot market is unfair to permanent stallholders due to the $10 price to rent space.
Said Walker: “There are a few individuals who have had conflict with each other. I think you're hearing probably from those individuals.”
“Our management staff were getting drawn into personal disputes, and I think that was quite taxing on staff as well.”
She did not want to comment further on the nature of the personal disputes.
It comes as the market manager resigned four weeks ago, leading to the Rotary trustees taking on a more hands-on role in managing the market temporarily.
Walker said applicants for the manager role will be interviewed next week.
Central to the concerns of some stallholders is a new contract signed late last year which changed the invoice payments for renting stall space from every four weeks to weekly.
Previously if a month had five Sundays, stallholders only had to pay for four.
This effectively raised costs for stallholders, with some also feeling they felt pressured to sign the new contract from market staff.
Walker said communication on the new invoicing could have been better at the time which caused some “angst” among stallholders.
"We're probably just charging the way we should always have, but it was a change in accounting systems that highlighted it,” she said.
However, she does not believe stallholders would have felt pressure to sign the contract.
“We run a pretty compassionate system, so we do have people that are in arrears, and we always work with them to make sure they can stay at the market.”
More recently some stallholders have been opposed to the new monthly car boot sales taking place next to the main market, where space can be rented for $10 – far less than the more than $50 permanent stallholders are paying a week.
Walker said stallholders have differing views of the car boot market with some believing it brings more business to the permanent stalls.
“I think what we need to make sure going forward is that those people that are coming to the car boot sales are not regulars. They should be people that are coming to try it out, or coming to sell excess things from their homes.
“What the market exists for is to put money back into the community through rotary projects. In the last year, we've put $30,000 from the market back into community projects.”
