Mayor recommends free-parking trial for Lower Hutt’s CBD

Lower Hutt Mayor Ray Wallace has recommended Council trials free-parking in the city’s central business district.

This recommendation comes from months of discussion and workshops with the relevant community groups, led by the Mayor, Deputy Mayor David Bassett and Council officers.

Mayor Ray Wallace says, “We’ve had extensive discussions and workshops over the last nine months with retailers, local Councillors and our hard working Central Community Committee around increasing the retail activity in our CBD, and it has been suggested regularly that a possible solution is to not charge for parking.”

“Waiving parking fees in the CBD may seem like an obvious solution to boost retail activity, but interestingly our officers have looked at a lot of studies from other cities, both here and abroad, and there is no evidence that it does so. But, those other cities are not Lower Hutt so that’s why we are going to trial some options and monitor what happens.

“It’s important that Council listens to our residents and business community, and keeps an open mind on solutions.”

Mayor Wallace also adds that there’s no such thing as a ‘free-park’, which needs to be understood going into this. For example, despite the loss of revenue, there’s still the cost of parking wardens who need to continue to enforce time limits and ongoing maintenance costs.

The question of whether this cost is spread across all ratepayers or through targeted rates is another important issue to be discussed and resolved. This is likely to be done as part of the annual plan consultation process in 2016.

The Mayor has asked Council officers to research and present on three options:

· Not charging for parking for a set period before Christmas.

· No charge for car-park users during major events in the CBD.

· “Buy one, get one free”: get two hours of parking for the price of one.

The final decision will be made by Council’s Traffic Subcommittee in late November.

These options would be undertaken for a trial period. During that period the level of retail spending would be assessed, to see if no-charge for parking has a positive impact on retail spend.

ENDS

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