Charging for parking at Country Parks including Blue Badge Holders
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Well, our councillors have excelled themselves again – not content with punishing any able bodied family in the Borough they also now target the disabled, whilst spending £4.5million on the worlds largest animal, the Ty Pawb White Elephant project. They vote unanimously to pursue the plans for parking charges at Country Parks for the able bodied and the disabled.
However, their names will be published and we will have the chance to vote them all out ‘en block’ at the next election. The self-opinionated jobsworth’s can find something else to destroy. For those who say “who else would do the job”, it doesn’t matter, we can elect anyone and even if they don’t attend any meetings it will be better for us all than the current incumbents. The councillors cannot hide behind the necessity to cut everything and raise council tax whilst spending £4.5 million on an unpopular White elephant.The irony of it all is that the council have recently asked for constituents views on ‘mutli-occupancy dwellings’ – a subject at the forefront of everyone’s minds ! It demonstrates that they don’t ask any relevant questions and don’t listen to answers, their questionnaires are just a front for ‘appearing to be democratic’
This must be the start of a ‘popular uprising’ against the councillors who impose their misguided acts against the wishes of the majority of constituents. It is a pity that I am not conversant with social media to begin a movement, but if anyone wants to instigate the social media ‘votethecouncillorsout’ cause, please feel free to do so.
There are 7000 Blue Badge holders in the County Borough. If all of those had replied to not vote for charging for Blue Badge parking, then we may have had a different outcome. The Leader of the Council uses the positive replies to charge for parking as justification for his decisions. It is not his fault it’s yours is his stance.
The Save Plas Madoc Leisure Centre Group with 3,000+ members did try & campaign to oust the councillors who voted to close the centre or abstained in the council election last May.
The outcome was not great despite going in with high hopes. I think most of the councillors managed to get voted back in despite massive public outrage at the time.
Doing a post mortem now, the issue was the group was full of political activists who were always going to vote against the incumbent councillors in the first place, so they weren’t adding in any new votes against the status quo. Also these voters were spread widely and thinly across all the different voting wards so had no aggregate effect – equating to about 30 voters per ward on average. They may have been able to persuade a handful of others who were unhappy with the status quo to vote against as well, but most incumbents comfortably got back in.
There was a higher concentration in Plas Madoc itself and the Leisure Centre friendly challenger candidate did get 100+ votes. But with the voter turnout so low at 26% the incumbent Paul Blackwell who abstained on a vote to save a facility in his own ward over fear of intimidation from more powerful councillors in his party (who then quit Labour to make the independent mess we have today) managed to scrape in by vote by rote for whoever the Labour candidate is voters. It is just shambolic that almost 75% of a community couldn’t be bothered to go and vote to save vital facilities in their area.
I know people care about losing facilities especially in rural areas as it’s regularly discussed what no longer exists in Penycae where I live. But no-one will democratically step up to vote or campaign to stop these things from going. Yet you tell people they can vote for Brexit and they’ll go to the polling station in droves. It’s like people are only capable of voting for bad decisions or to keep bad decision makers in.
It’s so long between elections that people forget stuff about who is running the town badly. They forget that we were promised a new leisure centre to replace Waterworld and it never happened.
They forget councillors have been given top of the range ipads twice within a few years of each other at the cost of many thousands, when it was pointed out both times that a Kindle or Android tablet at far lower cost per councillor (hundreds less) would have done the job.
They forget all the horrible cuts the county went through in the last difficult decisions process.
They forget how many hundreds of thousands of pounds were wasted in legal costs by the council challenging the legal decision to list the Groves site and losing.
They forget how many hundreds of thousands have been wasted on consultancy fees because the council don’t have any in-house experts.
They forget how low a return to the public coffers they get from Kingdom for all the littering fines as Kingdom take the Lion’s share of profit, leeching off the local population and creating misery to no greater benefit to the town.
Ignorance and apathy rules the day, I am sure there are countless other screw-ups I’m forgetting here (ironic) all leading up to Ty Pawb and the decimation of public funding despite being asked to pay more council tax for far less.
All this information has been laid out to the local electorate, they have been warned that they need to get out and vote for change. Nada, zip. But then they complain when things start affecting their lives 6 months after the elections and the horse has bolted the stable.
I know I may not be popular for saying this, but I can see where the council is coming from with the charges for Blue Badge Holders. A friend and I used to work for the same employer. She used a wheelchair and had a blue badge, I didn’t. The suggestion that all blue badge holders need help to afford parking would lead to the obvious conclusion that she was paid less than me, which in fact she wasn’t. Where I now work there are people with a range of physical conditions in receipt of very good wages.
The implication that all badge holders need help to pay for parking could be seen as demeaning to those holders who have excellent jobs (or have had good jobs and now have reasonable pensions) and only encourages the false perception that disabled people, including people having difficulty with mobility, couldn’t possibly be able to hold down a good job. I know that there are barriers created by some outdated employers who have issues employing someone with a disability, but don’t you think that assuming all blue badge holders must be on low incomes is only going to encourage this horrendous view?
I’d also suspect that most blue badge holders receive more benefits than most receiving financial support (and very rightly so) so perhaps a means test connected to the blue badge would be a fairer way to go – that way those with mobility limitations and also low incomes could be allocated free parking the limited funding available in all areas today could be targeted at those really struggling to pay to park?(I don’t say this as someone with no understanding of the difficulties lack of mobility can cause, but as someone with a progressive condition that already makes walking very painful, and is certain to become much worse in the future)
What’s the next step with me being disabled and use a wheelchair,am I to request a permit to use my wheelchair in Wrexham Borough and how much ? Disgusted
The Blue Badge scheme has always been a fantastic way of prioritising parking places close to important services for disabled persons. It doesn’t always need to be free to park and often isn’t as Blue Badge and poor don’t always go hand in hand. We have all probably quite often come across Blue Badges on luxury cars. Outside the Grosvenor Hotel Chester this past Sunday afternoon we had a sporty Jaguar and a Porsche both with Blue Badges! It does however need to be fair and the extra time being proposed will help with constraints of a wheelchair and other disabilities. It is not by all means a perfect world but as we are still facing austerity and severe cuts to all services it may be however unpopular a way of raising funds to help.
These very unpopular measures proposed by our Executive Board members and Council Leaders can only be fully justified when they finally realise that they can’t just keep throwing our hard-earned money at multiple layers of bureaucracy, consultants and legal challenges to tell them the obvious. They must also deal finally with this free car parking perk they seem to enjoy, if it’s true you can’t honestly justify it? The rubbish sprouted about being unable to carry out your duties without a parking space is just that Rubbish, if you want a car park space pay for it or lose it to someone either with or without a Blue badge who will or has to pay for it.
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