It was a rare peace-and-love moment in Pacific Grove: Organizers of the local farmers market sat down with representatives of the merchants who want the market moved. With some hugging and hand-holding, they reached an eleventh-hour compromise.

“We all had orgasms! It was heavenly,” P.G. Chamber of Commerce Moe Ammar jokes. “Like, ‘I can’t believe that this problem is solved.’”

Everyone’s Harvest director Iris Peppard initiated the March 2 get-together with hopes of heading off controversy at the March 3 City Council meeting. Peppard and an Everyone’s Harvest board member squared off with Ammar and two members of the Downtown Business Improvement District, who’d been complaining the market hurt their Monday night sales. They all agreed on moving the market to a city-owned parking lot south of Lighthouse Avenue on Saturday mornings.

But when Ammar presented the truce to the council the next day, some questioned what looked like a backroom deal.

The council voted 4-3 to direct staff to negotiate a change in the market’s use permit. But Councilwoman Deborah Lindsay, who voted in the minority, says it should never have come to the council. “If [Peppard] wants to submit an application to change the use permit, let her go ahead and do that,” she says. “Why do we need to get involved?”

Peppard’s now reconsidering the change, in light of what looks like a legal basis for keeping the market where it is.

“I was just trying to make the compromise before we were forced into something,” she says. “But I was unclear and naive about this whole process and what legal rights we have.”

EVERYONE’S HARVEST will hold a public board meeting Sunday, March 14, to consider applying for a permit change. 5pm, 3180 Imjin Road, Marina.

Read more at www.mcweekly.com/pgmarket, or follow the tweets at www.twitter.com/keraca