At the Ventnor Town Council (VTC) Meeting on Friday night, we learned that the Isle of Wight council (IWC) have made a massive U-turn on their decision to abolish the tourist parking permit.
Visitor denied permits
Cllr Scoccia revealed the news when responding to a resident, who during public question time appealed for VTC’s help in urging the IWC to reconsider the move to abolish tourist permits.
The guesthouse owner told the VTC that visitors, due to visit the Island in April, had called the IWC the week before looking to purchase their tourist parking permits, only to be told that these had been abolished (as has been reported from previous council meetings).
Cllr Scoccia responded by saying that the visitors should call the council again as the decision had been revised and tourist parking permits were now going to be made available for the 2010 season.
Official notice in CP
We were also tipped off (thanks Adam) that the news was published in the Official Notices section of the CP this week.
Sure enough on page 70 at the beginning of the section, there is a notice from the IWC stating that 2, 3, 4, 7 and 14 tourist parking permits would be available from 2 April 2010.
Welcome news for all
This major u-turn will be welcome news for anyone on the Island who relies on the tourist industry, as well as visitors to the Island.
The importance of the permit was argued at the Scrutiny Committee meeting in February when the budget proposals were presented and the permit abolition was announced.
Cllr Richards remarked that the IWC were missing opportunities by cancelling the tourist permit, but Stuart Love replied with something along the lines of, they’d make more money from having visitors pay for hourly parking than if they use parking permits.
iWight Website still to be corrected?
Hoping to find more info about the u-turn we checked the IWC Website.
It looks as though the information hasn’t been fed through to the Web team yet, as the following is still displayed to any potential visitors to the Island.
However, the online application form for the tourist permits still seems to be working, so it should only be a matter of time before the changes are updated.
