A PAY-TO-PARK proposal for the Tweed’s most popular beach and boating areas will tonight be abandoned if councillors take heed of the advice from council staff.
The parking meter plan drew a strong backlash from the community after councillors voted in January to consider charging people $2 an hour to park their cars in public car parks between Tweed Heads and Pottsville, with those pulling a trailer to be hit at $5 an hour. A $25 annual parking permit for residents was included.
Angry Kingscliff retailers feared the tourist trade wasn’t strong enough year-round to sustain paid parking on top of the GFC recovery, electricity price hikes and beach erosion.
But a report from the council’s planning and infrastructure department has given some hope with its recommendation councillors shelve further paid parking investigations because the cost of preliminary studies into parking demand is far more than $30,000 council hasset aside in its budget.
There is also no money yet in the budget to trial the scheme at two pilot sites.
Councillors will tonight decide whether to put the paid parking scheme on the backburner or whether to inject the extra money necessary to cover the full scope of the parking demand study.
Reducing the scale of the study to meet the $30,000 budget is not considered an option because it would go against Roads and Maritime Services guidelines for such studies and limit the data on which council could base its decision on charging people to park.
Tweed mayor Barry Longland welcomed the opportunity to revisit the issue, saying councillors had not given due consideration to the real costs and benefits of a paid parking plan when it was first put forward by the then-general manager David Keenan as a way of raising revenue instead of increasing rates.
Mr Keenan has since been sacked by the council, although the decision was not unanimous.
Cr Longland said charging people to park in the most popular areas would just push traffic into the suburban back streets.
He said he would tonight again vote against the proposal and doubted it would get majority council support this time around.
“We don’t want to scare people away and when you think of our main competition for getting people into the Tweed it is the southern Gold Coast,” Cr Longland said.
“There is no paid parking south of Burleigh and if we introduce it here people will just decide to go over the border instead.”
He said there was a strong campaign from the fishing and boating community against the proposal and it was ‘nothing to wake up in the morning to find 100 emails (about it) in your inbox’.
“I am very pleased we have another opportunity to look at this and I am sure a lot of other people will be as well,” he said.
Even though the council had not yet gone to the public consultation stage of the proposal, there was public outcry when the news broke, prompting 200 written submissions to council as well as form letters and a petition.
The report recommends council defer the plan until adequate funding is made available in future budgets.
It also says the strong negative public response so far means any decision to revisit the scheme in the future would require a ‘very high level’ of community consultation.
