Committee rejects plans to reduce disabled parking spaces at bus station

Proposals to reduce the number of disabled parking spaces near the town’s bus station have been rejected by councillors.

Planning committee members unanimously voted to refuse an application by the council’s own assets team to reduce the number of mobility spaces from five to four.

The spaces, near the northern entrance to the bus station were allocated for disabled parking in 2016 after plans to convert the former Oriel Wrecsam into a small town centre police station were approved.

The plans had been put forward due to “interference with the turning of buses” when the disabled parking bay nearest Trinity Street is occupied.

However the application came under fire from councillors, who argued that moving more spaces away from the Shopmobility service at the bus station would be wrong.

John Gallanders from AVOW referenced the initial decision to relocate the spaces two years ago and questioned what has changed since then to create a “health and safety condition”.

Mr Gallanders said: “Has the safety issue been in existence since June 2016? If so why has this not been brought to our attention and the planning committee at an earlier stage.

“There is evidence from own observations of two key issues that on occasion cause obstruction- neither of which are do with the allocation of designated car parking. These can be substantiated by reviewing councils own CCTV system.”

Cllr Paul Roberts also asked for details on how many accidents have taken place in that area over the past few years. However the meeting was told that such information wasn’t available to give the committee at that time.

Leader of the Council, Cllr Mark Pritchard, called on the committee to refuse the proposals and said he was “disappointed” with the report that had been presented to councillors.

He continued: “Speaking as lead member for the health and safety portfolio I am disappointed in the report in front of yourselves. There has been no consultation done with myself on the area up for discussion.

“I would not support it personally and I would ask the planning committee to refuse on the grounds of at the present moment in time, this is not an operational land area or ownership of King Street bus station.

“We must protect blue badge parking areas in this council for obvious reasons..”

“I hope the committee refuse as no grounds to support. The issue here is unauthorised parking by bus operators, if they are doing something wrong then we should manage them. We should not take an alternative route to remove parking space just to try to appease them.”

He added that while the spaces can currently be used by anyone, work is underway to put a traffic regulation in place to allocate the spaces for disabled parking.