Page 5877 - Week 18 - Wednesday, 11 December 1991

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be a level consistent with the lower end of it now, roughly where you drive in, or it may go even lower than that so that it is about the level of the adjacent car parking space in the offices of the Catholic church next door, what used to be a Catholic school. The expectation is that there will be pretty much one level of car parking; so at the top side of the car park it will be quite well dug in.

Further to that, the requirements are such that I rather expect this car park to win some architectural award. It will be well constructed, of course, but it will also be aesthetic.

Mr Moore: Like the ones on Ainslie Avenue that should be turned into gaols.

MR WOOD: In its design it will be rather better than that, I should think, Mr Moore. I have seen photographs of some of the car parks we have around the town. If you are interested, members, photographs and some draft sketches are available for viewing in the anteroom behind me. It is possible to design an aesthetic car park, and that will be done.

For example, there will be a height level of the walls sufficient to ensure that lights are not distracting to nearby residents, and there are not very many nearby residents. There will not be light poles up high; they will be set into the side walls so that there will be minimum visual disruption to the people in, I think, three or five houses close to the car park. It will be done well.

I might say that one of the concerns of the cathedral, one that I think is highly valid, is that they were anxious that some of their elderly parishioners would not have to park too far away. The cathedral, in its letter, comments that if the cinema was operating on Sunday morning - I do not know that they do very much - attendance at the theatre might take the car parking spots right outside the cathedral and deprive their parishioners of that facility. We will certainly look at the traffic signs in that area, the parking signs. If there is anything we can do about that we will, although, acknowledging that it is on a Sunday, I am not sure how it could be policed.

Mr Duby: It could read "Christians only" or something like that.

MR WOOD: Well, we might do that, Mr Duby. We will look at that. I also point out that use of the car park, as I have described it, with that ground floor level, a low level, would mean that any parishioner would have a very easy and very short walk from that new car park across what is also a car park at the back of the church offices and across the road to the cathedral. I think that would be a quite convenient path that they could follow.


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