Things go from bad to worse for Mornington Peninsula Shire’s paid parking program, with a new hole now punched into the annual budget after the disused equipment failed to sell on Gumtree.
The Mornington Peninsula paid parking trial ran from December 2023 until September 2024 at three locations on the peninsula: Sunnyside Beach, Mt Eliza, Schnapper Point (near the pier), Mornington and near Flinders pier.
Councillors voted earlier this year to kill the trial off for good, and list the items for sale to recoup some of the costs of the trial.
The failure to sell the signage, licence plate scanners, and thousands of reams of pre-printed paper to issue fines has left council officers scrambling for a solution.
One of the officers, who spoke exclusively to The Public Record’s Derrick DiMaggio said they may have to further downgrade the shire’s climate action to save money to plug the budget hole.
In April of this year, councillors voted to disband the shire’s “Climate Emergency Declaration” and were now intending to pursue a more cost-effective “Climate Resilience Plan”. Even that looks like it may not be within budget, so officers are drafting a still-cheaper “Climate Whisper” or even a “Climate Subtle But Almost Unnoticable Nod” to bring the cost to ratepayers down even further.
“We just don’t know how this happened,” said the council officer.
“People go waste all sorts of money buying things on Gumtree. Here we were, offering something that could actually make you money. Millions in fact. All you would need are three carparks, and an unsuspecting public, and you’d be all set”.
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