19 March (Part 3) - More pain for motorists. More of Craske’s strange accounting
Parking charges are going up almost everywhere. Charged hours are extended
to evenings and Sundays. Fines go up £10 and outlying shopping centres
get the same higher level of fine as Bexleyheath in future.
Charges are to be introduced for parking at Hall Place and Craske in his contribution to
Strategy 2014 (the cuts document) says this is to recoup the million pounds
he spent on improving that car park. I’m not sure where he gets that
figure from, silly as it is; the cabinet papers for 28th February gives the
capital cost as an even sillier £3,605,000, of which £1·27m. was spent this year.
It’ll take quite a while at 80 pence an hour to get that extravagance back won’t it?
If the 300 spaces are fully occupied for ten hours a day every day of the year Craske will get our
own money back in four years. Over £800k. a year from just one newly chargeable car-park
is a big ‘If’. In the same papers it says that all the new
parking charges put together are projected to raise only £378,000 over the next
four years, so just how long will millions spent on a new car park
take to get back? Should we be spending money on renovating car parks anyway with so many of
the disabled and the needy being hung out to dry?
It is also revealed that total car parking revenues are expected to drop by half a million
a year - the figure varies a little depending on which report you believe. One wonders how
that lines up with one of Craske’s official answers to a resident’s question on
2nd March which claimed that
parking demand was up by 20%.
The answer defused the question but as with the
Parsons Brinckerhoff answer last November, it
was a pre-planned deception with little or no relationship with truth. How else would
you explain Craske’s answers contradicting official council documents all the time?