Multimillion-dollar makeovers and ... hanging baskets?

If Palmerston North was a person, it would have a personality disorder.

On one hand, it has some spectacular amenities, a booming events calendar, and an ambitious $26.6 million plan to modernise Broadway Ave and the streets around The Square. That is the visionary, confident, side of its character.

On the other, there is a tendency to sweat the small stuff. The detail-obsessed, practical and dependable, thrifty, fear-of-change sort of thing.

In between, there are business people, retailers, and even city councillors vacillating about the direction and speed of progress.

Is it a matter of having a grand plan and running with it, or labouring over every constituent part before leaping ahead?

A case in point was the issue of janine.rankin@fairfaxmedia.co.nz

the hanging baskets.

This is a slightly different matter to the mega streetscape upgrade, proposed to begin on Square East from The Plaza to Broadway, which has descended into sink hole of worries about whether Palmerston North motorists could possibly manage to park straight.

For sure, backing straight out of a 90 degree rather than an angle park into traffic has potential to be uncomfortable, to force other road users to slow down, and even discourage some people from bringing their cars into town at all.

That could well be part of the theory, actually, but the concept that the central city should be more about pedestrians than cars is slow to catch on.

And surely the whole redesign does not live or die on whether or not the car parks take a 45 degree turn.

But that is a digression. Back to the more immediate prospects of giving Broadway Ave a lift.

Council staff have found a bucket of money, some $304,000, which is available to be spent now, or at least very soon, on improvements to Broadway Ave.

Through the clever use of modern lighting, one of the goals is to turn the slightly-creepy alleyways into attractive throughroutes for pedestrians, recognising that the Princess St end of the street, in particular, comes to life as night falls.

It would also see some more people parks created along the street, encouraging more shoppers and diners to linger outdoors.

The idea was to keep the improvements either portable, or in line with bolder, long-term plans for the street.

So any trees would be in containers that could be moved, their shape would be kept more vertical than spreading, and planting underneath them would create the perfect place for any perching bird’s poo to land, rather than on people or cars or the pavement.

A further part of the modest upgrade was to improve the power supply available for outdoor performances.

But what bothered our city leaders the most?

That the idea of installing hanging baskets had missed the cut.

So they elevated them up the priority list. Hanging baskets. Really? Could they think of anything more provincial, more small town twee, a bigger cliche?

They are simply old-fashioned, and not even retro.

They can be designed to be even more annoying when kitted out with automatic sprinkler systems that come on just as people are walking under them.

And without such a system, they can quickly become dry, bedraggled and tatty.

But at an extraordinary $500 apiece, perhaps the planners have in mind a modern and ultra-classy twist on the humble hanging basket.

END NOTE:

And so, some say, what is the point of all this beautification of the streets around The Square and Broadway Ave if there is still a beggar problem in town?

Once again, the council has reverted to an on-again-off-again, flip-flop approach.

A year ago, staff advised against a bylaw banning begging for a range of very good reasons.

Mayor Grant Smith argued the softly-softly approach was not working.

The idea of using Safe City hosts was almost adopted, but then it was decided that would look too tough.

So, we reverted to the really softly-softly approach of using social workers to make sure the beggars did not actually have any real need to beg.

It was humanitarian, and although seen by some as a failure, it did discover and address some real needs and get help to those willing to be helped.

And it also suggests any next steps can be taken with a clear conscience. The remaining beggars are doing it because they can, not because they have to.

Their presence remains an enormous sense of frustration for retailers, who hear daily from customers too timid to walk past a beggar or who avoid certain shops or whole areas of the city altogether.

And now we’re looking at a bylaw again, and the reasons why that is a bad idea continue.

What Palmerston North needs is to continue developing its calendar of events and street activities and even, its prosperity.

For one of the things Christmas showed, was that when there are plenty of people around, there is nowhere for the beggars to put themselves.