The car park within the Churchyard of Holy Trinity Church has now been available to the public for some years. This came about because the Churchyard had been identified as an open space within the town which could be used as a public car park, thus helping to relieve the chronic shortage of parking in Llandudno.
The parking fees charged were in line with those charged in other town centre car parks and the income generated certainly helped the then Parish of Llandudno to pay its “Quotia” or “Parish Share”, now known as the Bishop’s Ministry Fund. The sum that the Llandudno Ministry Area has to raise this year, 2019, for the Fund is over £85,000, a greater than 6% increase on the previous year. The other major expense incurred by the Ministry Area is the maintenance of its churches – Holy Trinity Church (1865) and St. Tudno’s (12th Century) – which runs into the tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds every year. If it were not for the income generated by the Holy Trinity car park, then the Ministry Area would have had great difficulty in paying its quotia to the Diocese of Bangor and maintaining the fabric of its buildings.
The two car parking machines were of the same model as used for on and off street parking by the Conwy County Borough Council. Over the years, the machines have become less reliable and now need to be replaced (as have the council-owned machines). The Parish of Llandudno, later the Llandudno Ministry Area, has never had a policy of enforcing the car park’s Terms and Conditions, simply relying upon the goodwill and honesty of its customers to keep the terms. Happily, the vast majority of users have done so but there remains an element of users who either park all day with a one hour ticket or park all day with no ticket at all, despite being presented with polite requests to make full payment in the future.
However, it was not this loss of income which has caused the Ministry Area to seek partners to manage the car park. Firstly, the two machines generate a great deal of loose cash and it is getting increasingly unrealistic to rely on the goodwill of volunteers to empty them; as a consequence, several specialist parking firms were approached and Euro Car Parks, which manages the car park owned by Bangor Cathedral, was chosen to manage the car park at Holy Trinity Church. Secondly, the selfishness of a few has mode it more difficult for others to find an empty parking space in a town notoriously short of them.
