The Tauranga City Council recently delivered a circular to me, inviting me to express my view on their latest brainwave and email this to them. So for the first time ever, I did.
Guess what? The email address provided, didn't work. So I'm sending this letter to a more reliable source.

The downtown area of Mount Maunganui area would have to be one of the most concentrated areas of parks and reserves within New Zealand.

Within a few hundred metres easy walking in any direction from Phoenix carpark there are parks:

1. May St
2. Mount Drury (which includes four sections of grass on Grace Ave, aquired by TCC at considerable expense, and a rare occurrence to see people use it).
3. Banks St
4. Coronation Park

Not to mention the very large recreational areas of the Mount, the Ocean, the Harbour, all of which are in easy walking distance and are in fact the principle reason people come here in the first place.

There is however, a major shortage of parking at Mount Maunganui at any time other than very off peak. In fact, the biggest problem people have when visiting the existing recreational areas is the lack of close proximity parking.

Only a council (or perhaps a communist party), could conclude we have an excess of recreational areas and a shortage of vehicle parks, so let's remove the vehicle parks and convert them to recreational areas.

There is such a shortage of parking at Mount Maunganui, when the cruise ships are in port the public are excluded from public parking areas, to provide parking for commercial interests.

Instead of concentrating ratepayers' time and money on ludicrous small-scale image projects, TCC should be concentrating on providing adequate parking resources for the existing recreational facilities.

The Mount needs more parking areas, not less.

P Axelrad, Mount Maunganui.