Push for footpath upgrade
The state of footpaths in Katikati’s main street is causing concern with more people having trips and falls.
Katikati town promotions manager Jacqui Knight is keen to put together a case for upgrading the footpaths through the main shopping area from The Village shopping area to Beach Rd. She has a couple of motivations for this, the first is to encourage retail shopping.
“We have some really good retail shops in town but we do not have a very enticing environment to shop in,” says Jacqui.
“Many retailers are unhappy with the quality of the footpaths and we cannot attract the more ‘boutique style’ retail shop when we do not provide a reflective shopping environment.
“Katikati will stagnate ifwe do not keep up appearances.”
The other issue is safety. Jacqui knows of one person who recently tripped on the footpath outside Sunny’s store and got bruised and scratched up. She is keen to hear of other incidents people may know of where there have been accidents as a result of the poor quality of the footpaths.
Jacqui says in general the paths are hard to keep clean and “are in a patchy and bad condition. I know thatwe are stuckwith the traffic for the time being waiting for the bypass but we cannot keep putting work off in the main street.
“We should still update our main street prior to a bypass so that people know what we have to offer.”
Jacqui understands Western Bay of Plenty District Council has no immediate plans to do anything with the footpaths, however if there is enough support from the community then they may look at it.
“Waihi Beach and Te Puke have really nice footpaths. We need to stop being the poor relation and get some community drive behind this.”