Thirty one quid.
At the full fat rate of a pound an hour that’s what the payment would have been had I been sitting in an Angus Council car park awaiting the answer to a request for the first full month income data from the scheme which has become the county’s bureaucratic bete noire.
Okay, the charges don’t run round the clock and, yes, the maximum daily fee is £4, so I’ll concede the figure is somewhat inflated – for good reason to which we will return.
Of the many and varied PR disasters surrounding successor councils in Angus, none have the characteristics of this latest crisis – and make no mistake, it is a crisis, for the authority and its balance sheet, for our elected representatives and, most of all, for the independent businesses which, for generations, have been the beating heart of the Angus burghs.
None of those hard-working local firms are likely to deny that our council, like every other in Scotland, is facing unprecedented financial hardship.
Just as no-one connected with Angus Council would, I imagine, take issue with the challenges which a dramatically changed and fragile high street environment presents for the shops and businesses struggling for survival on it.
The distressing siege mentality of this shambles was captured succinctly by campaign spokeswoman Margaret Robertson when she accused the full council in Forfar of “arrogance beyond belief and contempt for the whole of Angus” over a continuing refusal to consider compromise or concession.
The silence from elected representatives on this issue from the outset has been deafening and the chasm between councillors and communities is widening like the cracks in car park asphalt the meter money is destined to fill.
Setting aside completely unforeseeable bumps in the road such as idiotic arsonists and last week’s power outage which rendered every parking meter useless, there also has to be mounting concern the financial calculations surrounding the scheme are more fag packet figures than realistic projections.
I genuinely hope I’m proved very wrong.
Because if the income does stack up to the £700,000 annual forecast, it will have to be the result of a potentially lifeline spin-off for businesses teetering on the brink.
And with that will also come a Monday Matters climbdown and my donation of thirty one pounds to a charity of the council leader’s choosing.
