“It is frustrating that people knock the town continuously” – council leader calls for positivity over regeneration

The leader of Wrexham Council has called for more positivity about regeneration and events in the town, stating that the negativity can stop people from investing in the area.

It comes after mixed comments over the new paving in the town centre were relayed during last week’s executive board meeting.

The new paving and street furniture works on Hope Street and Queens Street were completed last autumn as part of a £420,000 investment to improve the appearance of the town centre and were billed as a ‘phase 1’ of investment hinting at future phases.

It is hoped that other areas of the town will undergo similar works subject to money being secured, which could come as a result of the currently unallocated budget underspend.

However the paving has received a mixed response from members of the public, with some welcoming the investment and calling for more, and others questioning if the money could have been better spent in the context of wider council cuts.

Cllr Dana Davies, leader of the Labour Group, said she had received “no end of complaints about the town centre paving” and called on the administration to invest a £104,000 underspend into community resilience programmes.

She added: “I think need a much wider debate on the town centre. If you speak to various people in the county they will tell you that the town centre to them is the church to Queens Square, others will say it is Lord Street.

“I think we need a wider debate so that if we are investing we need to identify what is the town centre.

“When you’re considering where to make that underspend, which is because of cuts in services, I think we need to be smarter on how we weigh that up.

“If we can get a better output from investing into community resilience rather than paving a piece of the town centre, then maybe that’s where the debate is.”

However Cllr Pritchard said that it is “frustrating that people knock the town continuously” and urged people to be more positive about Wrexham.

He added that although there had been some negative comments about the paving, there had also been plenty of positives about how “well the town looks” as well, pointing that previous Labour administrations had not invested in such a way in the town and that is why it was needed.

Cllr Pritchard said: “With the town there hadn’t been money spent on it for a long time and we were getting complaints about the paving and that the town was looking shabby.

“We did apply to the Welsh Government for a grant and we were unsuccessful, I was disappointed as I thought we would have been successful.

“It always surprises me that for some reason people make the town centre investment negative and they make it out to be a bad thing. I’m not saying you are Dana, but I’m saying some people.

“If you go to Liverpool you’ll never hear a Liverpudlian criticising Liverpool. You’ll never hear a Mancunian knocking Manchester.

“We should celebrate the investment in the town, all of us within Wrexham. It is a good thing that sometimes we have some money and we can invest in it. Let’s celebrate the money is going into it and take the politics and the nonsense out of it.”

He added: “It is frustrating that people knock the town continuously and it doesn’t do the town any good.”

Potentially alluding to the then imminent announcement that Wales Comic Con would be moving to Telford for its December event, Cllr Pritchard added that the negativity from some quarters can affect people from investing in the town.

He added: “I meet lots of business people who want to come to the town and the negativity sometimes affects this town.

“I’ll give you an example, we have a company that runs something in Wrexham which is fantastic in my eyes and they were knocked due to somebody couldn’t get to where they wanted to go at a certain time because of the traffic.

“If you run major events in Wrexham, which I hope we run more of, you’re going to get some traffic problems. That comes with celebrating that the money is coming into town and that the investment and the events.

“I do get frustrated when people go out of their way on social media to knock the town. We should celebrate the investment regardless of where it comes from.”

You can read our coverage of Wales Comic Con’s decision to host its winter event in Telford, here and ongoing reaction to the news here.