By Violet Brown
SOME car parks owned by Ards and North Down Council ‘look pretty awful’ according to a local politician.
The claim was made by Comber councillor Patricia Morgan during a committee debate into a significant decrease in the number of motorists using council-owned car parks across the borough.
The Alliance politician said many car parks needed maintenance work carried out warning: “If our car parks don’t look nice our towns don’t look nice’.
Her comments came during a discussion at the council’s Environment Committee when Richard McCracken, the council’s head of Regulatory Services, said car parking figures ‘have never recovered from Covid’.
“The prices charged haven’t increased either so as inflation rises we obviously have a problem there,” he said. “Predominately the numbers are preventing us from bringing in the income which has been forecast previously”.
The council took over management of the car parks from the Department of Infrastructure (DfI) in 2015 under the Review of Public Administration.
The council’s environment chief, David Lindsay, explained there was no statutory requirement for the council to provide public car parks. “Therefore any deficit in terms of providing or maintaining them versus the income we get has to be borne by the ratepayer whether they use those car parks or not – that’s the stark reality,” he said.
Mr Lindsay said the council is ‘facing a growing challenge in relation to the condition of our car parks’.
“We had proposed to go some way to fixing that by amending our charges and some of the legacy charges that were put in place many years ago by DfI”, he explained. “We have been hampered by the legislative situation – there is no legislative power for us to introduce a new car park order with a new charging structure that runs in parallel and contradicts the existing car parking order”.
While accepting the council is not a business, councillor Morgan said the drop in people using the car parks was a problem.
“If we are not getting the income into the car parks it means we can’t maintain our car parks and quite frankly there’s quite a lot of them that look dreadful and really desperately need some maintenance,” she said.
“If the car parks don’t look nice it doesn’t make our towns look nice to come to.
“Some of our car parks, to be blunt, look pretty awful – it seriously is a problem.”
