"At the Taxpayers' Union, we acknowledge that parking wardens need decent shoes, but we urge the council to put the shoe on the other foot and recognise how ratepayers, hammered with rising living costs, make prudent choices to limit the cost of their own footwear."
I'm sorry, what? Calling out the council for spending money on new shoes for parking wardens is just plain mean.
It is also extremely unfair to accuse wardens of costing ratepayers by issuing tickets.
People are issued parking tickets when they break the rules. Don't shoot the messenger.
The Taxpayers' Union suggested councils placing large orders, with long-standing relationships with suppliers, should be able to leverage discounts.
Alternatively, it suggested the council could provide wardens with a $200 allowance each year to source their own shoes.
The spirit of the Taxpayers' Union's fact-finding mission and subsequent commentary is petty.
Wasteful spending in local government should be called out and councils should be held accountable for it.
But not every dollar the council spends needs to be called into question. Providing new footwear for parking wardens who walk up to 20 kilometres a day is a necessity in my book.
All the more so because being a parking warden can be a pretty unpleasant job at the best of times.
The Herald recently found fists, elbows and even an electric scooter were among the weapons used in attacks on parking wardens in the past year.
Some councils reported big jumps in abuse, others said it just kept on happening.
In Wellington specifically there has been a "significant increase" in the number and severity of assaults on wardens since the first Covid-19 lockdown, city council spokesman Richard MacLean said.
"This has had an effect on the overall turnover of staff in the last 10-12 months as people decide that coming to work just to be verbally abused every day is no longer rewarding."
The Taxpayers' Union even went as far as saying there was a moral hazard: "Wardens will happily wear out their ratepayer-funded shoes with personal use".
I personally highly doubt parking wardens are pulling out those big black boots to wear for leisure on a Sunday. I used to work at a petrol station and wouldn't have dreamt of wearing my black steel cap boots anywhere other than at work.
The council currently employs 57 parking wardens, each of whom is provided with two pairs of shoes for summer and winter.
The shoes are audited and replaced as often as every year and so they should be.
A cost of living crisis does not mean we should all of a sudden be questioning whether people employed in frontline jobs deserve new shoes.
Parking wardens are real people too.
