Robert's Market Report

After one message and three telephone conversations with underlings since last weekend, I've yet to hear from the mayor's communications director about the reports regarding the mayor's position on Sunday openings at the Reading Terminal Market.

As noted earlier, some merchants report Mayor Street is opposed to continuation of Sunday hours at the Reading Terminal Market, which were introduced earlier this fall as a "test" through the end of the year.

There could be any number of different reasons for the failure of the mayor's office to respond, not all of them nefarious:

• It simply could have slipped through the cracks. (Unlikely, given my four phone calls since last weekend, but still possible.)

• The communications director hasn't been able to discuss it with the mayor or other appropriate source in the office. (Also unlikely; if a political/government press officer isn't conferring with his/her client daily, he/she isn't doing their job.)

• They want to blow me off simply because my blog and eGullet aren't considered significant. (More likely than the previous two possibilities -- and who's to say such an assumption isn't correct )

• The mayor doesn't have a position. (Certainly possible, but there's no reason not to communicate that. If he wanted to hedge, the mayor's spokesperson could simply say: "As RTM management indicated, this is an experiment, so we'll let the experiment run its course and allow RTM management to assess the experiment rather than prejudge it.")

Of course, there is at least one other possibility, one that, at this point in time, I think the most likely: the mayor does have a position, but wishes not to communicate it at this time.

As further update to my initial report, two different sources at the RTM have told me they have heard the reports of the mayor's opposition to continued Sunday openings. One source was at a loss to pin down the origin of the rumor; the other thought it originated with a member of the Reading Terminal Market Corporation's board.

FWIW, when the Sunday opening proposal was presented to the RTMC board, the one representative directly appointed by the mayor as his representative, Peter Iacovoni, voted in favor of the experiment.