SHOALHAVEN City Council needs to outline its carparking strategy for the Ulladulla CBD or run the risk of turning prospective developers away.
Ulladulla businessman Glen Rowen believes council should look at buying a Boree Street home that comes up for auction next weekend in a bid to help solve the town's carparking problems in the northern CBD vicinity.
If not, it could be forced to spend millions of dollars on an alternative solution further down the track.
Mr Rowen told the Times last week that he paid council $186,500 in 1992 for 57 carparking spaces on the western side of Boree Street.
The carpark was sold a couple of years later for the Coles development and Mr Rowen's carparking spaces disappeared.
He has been told the spaces have been redistributed throughout town but no-one at council has been able to tell him where.
They are certainly not within close walking distance of the development he needed them for.
Mr Rowen said he had always been told that council would purchase the Boree Street home if it came on the market, for carparking.
Now he has been told that council won't look at purchasing the site because it's not high enough on council’s strategy index to warrant such a move.
The issue was discussed behind closed doors at a January 24 council meeting.
Minutes from the meeting simply state that council resolved 'not (to) pursue the acquisition of land at 5 Boree Street, Ulladulla'.
Mr Rowen says that if the site is purchased by a developer the CBD's carparking must become a high priority.
He said it was a prime development site but there was simply nowhere in close proximity to put another 30 or so carparking spaces.
Mr Rowen also explained that a recent agreement by council to lease 20 spaces beside the cinemas was a short term agreement and that that property and another adjacent to it will inevitably be redeveloped providing even more demand for nearby parking.
Mr Rowen has been told that the new carparking spaces at Target and Woolies will be enough to solve the town's carparking woes.
But he said Target and Woolies wouldn't be happy about having to provide carparking spaces for other businesses in town.
Regardless, few people would walk from the Woolies carpark to businesses at the other end of town such as the post office.
“They (council) don't understand the hill - they just don't get it.”
Mr Rowen said it was a case of providing developers with the confidence that if they spend money in the town, adequate carparking will be available close enough to serve that development, for the duration of the development.
“We need to know that we're going to get it (carparking) where we need it,” he told the Times last week.
“How can anyone have any confidence in council if they can't tell developers where their carparking will be?”
If council doesn't look at purchasing the Boree Street block it would need to look for land elsewhere - possibly at much greater expense - or build a multi-storey carpark at a cost of millions of dollars to ratepayers.
“This is about rebalancing the parking distribution so that all customers can shop more readily in any part of the town - the whole community benefits from this and it should be high on council's priorities,” Mr Rowen said.
He said the fiscally responsible thing for them to do would be to purchase the Boree Street block now and address the problem before it gets even further out of hand.
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