Should the Council be paid for FREE parking?
When our business rates are getting us less and less in return, is it right that our levy tax is used to pay the Council for "FREE" parking incentives.
Advancing Aberystwyth quote the Council as being a partner so would it not be too much to ask the Council to provide the extra days of parking to the Town businesses for FREE and not charge for it ?
Partnerships are about, give and take, yet since the introduction of the BID, the Council have reduced their festive FREE parking offering to 3 Saturday's only, leaving the full four weekends offer to be subsidised and paid for by levy payers ...via Advancing Aberystwyth.
P.S. Just reading more of the promises above, they are either crazy, should be done by the council or can be done without a BID anyway:
> Zip wire – pie in the sky, not got the amount of money to do this in a long term meaningful way.
> Ice Rink - self sustaining project when all they’ve shown so far is how much money it can lose? If self sustaining the council will be happy to continue with it anyway by itself, as other non-BID councils do without any BID support!
> Cleaning using volunteers – those volunteers will still be around without a BID. Get a town centre partnership together as an alternative to a BID.
> Parking – yea give levy funds to the council and discourage them from offering free parking.
> Marketing campaign – the council have resources and should be doing this anyway, again a BID discourages them from doing this properly. How do you think non-BID towns are marketed?
> Park & Ride – again council as part of it’s green / climate emergency strategy should be putting resources into this as other non BID town Councils are.
> Town wifi – waste of money in this day & age, old fashioned gimmick. Most people have mobile data, and if need wifi so many coffee shops etc offer it free anyway.
Get the message Aberystwyth? All sounds nice but stop and think about each point made in the business plan before you cast your vote.