Popular park’s gates will only open for football games after spate of problems
GATES to the football pitch at Penllwyn Park in Carmarthen will be locked to the public and only opened when an arranged match is to be played.
A sub committee of Carmarthen Town Council - which owns the park that sits between Picton Place and Sycamore Way - put forward the recommendation last month to lock the gates.
Now that recommendation by the General Purposes Committee has been agreed by a full meeting of the town council.
It comes after a summer of incidents including shards of broken glass and beer bottles strewn across the grass, coupled with a longstanding problem of dog fouling plaguing the area.
The council said dog fouling keeps happening at the site, despite awareness campaigns, visits by enforcement officers and the provision of signage and bins in the area. At the end of the summer people had been holding barbecues on the pitch with a very large amount of broken glass and bottles littering the area.
The pitch gates will be locked to the public outside of arranged football matches from Friday, October 15.
This will follow the arrival of a new slide at the park’s play area, which is to reopen, after the previous slide was vandalised.
Mayor of Carmarthen Cllr Gareth John said: “This is a decision that we would much prefer not to have to take and has been considered very carefully by the town council.
“Dog fouling has been a problem on the football pitch for many years and we have tried to work with local users of Penllwyn Park to avoid having to lock the gates in this way.
“As a local authority we have a responsibility to make sure that the users of our facilities are able to do so safely and people, especially those children and young people who represent local football teams that use the pitch, should not have to continuously put up with this.
“The junior section of the Carmarthen Stars football club have worked hard and done their best to clear up the pitch before all their matches over the years, but we are having to take these steps to prevent the current situation from continuing and getting worse.”