Clock ticking for city’s temporary car parks
More than 30 temporary car parks in central Christchurch are at risk of being shut down by the city council.
In December last year, the Christchurch City Council wrote to the owners of 95 temporary offstreet car parks, warning them to either cease their operations or apply for resource consent. The owners have until April 30 to comply or the council could issue a $300 fine and an abatement notice to cease the operation.
Yesterday, the council’s head of regulatory compliance, Tracey Weston, said 31 of the 95 car park owners had not responded to the call for compliance.
Fifteen consent applications had been received so far and another five car park owners said they would cease operating them.
A resource consent application does cost money, but the council said the exact cost varied depending on an application’s quality and complexity.
The council’s crackdown on unconsented car parks worries the chair of the Central City Business Association, Annabel Turley. Fewer car parks would give people an excuse not to come into the city, she said.
‘‘We need all the parks we can get. At the moment, it is the way that Cantabrians get around.’’
She wanted the council to consider what was best for the city and support car park owners in becoming compliant. ‘‘We need to encourage people to come in.’’
City councillor James Gough, who chairs a central city momentum working group, said there was no point having a regulatory framework if it was not enforced.
After the earthquakes there was something of a ‘‘cowboy’’ approach to car parking, he said, but 10 years on there needed to be more structure.
Some of the unconsented car parks were unsightly and dangerous, he said.
‘‘The state of a number of the carparking spaces in the central city are really sub-par and nothing that we can be proud of.’’
Enforcing the council’s rules was a level of quality control that ‘‘any sensible person should and would welcome’’, Gough said.
The council’s crackdown on the temporary car parks is part of its wider ‘‘vacant sites programme’’, which aims to spur on development of vacant central city land.
In January this year there were nearly 70 hectares of vacant land in central Christchurch.
The council has said it would review the number of temporary offstreet car parks in the city as part of a new parking policy. A council document described some of the sites as ‘‘messy’’.
Some in the business community were wary of the review, saying removing car parking was not good for the fragile city centre, while some developers behind the city’s permanent car-parking buildings supported the review.
‘‘We need all the parks we can get. At the moment, it is the way that Cantabrians get around.’’
Annabel Turley
Central City Business Association chair