OUR SAY
There’s no doubt that the eyesore that is the Walton’s building stops some people from coming to the Valley. If its owners are made to fix the 65 problems identified in a recent City Council show-cause notice to the building’s owners, then that will go some of the way to improving the precinct’s tarnished image.
But this newspaper notes that the two main risks to the health and safety of people venturing into the precinct – the shoddy public passageway through the Walton’s building from Valley Metro towards Wickham Street, and the often-stalled escalators down to that street, are not covered by the show-cause notice.
And while council is acting tough by apparently having talks with the owners of the building that once housed the Chinese Club, that those owners have not been given show-cause notices of their own beggars belief, especially now that Lord Mayor Graham Quirk has discovered after all he has the powers to force action on owners who are happy tolandbank their properties for as long as it takes to get the prices they want.
The walkway with the missing tiles and often dirty floors and the seldom start-often stopped escalators are disgraceful states of affairs that have been the subject of condemnation in this newspaper for many, many months.
And sorry for this awful pun, but we reckon the people legally responsible for both won’t have a leg to stand on when someone takes a fall over the missing tiles in the walkway, or badly injures or even kills themselves taking a tumble down the stationary escaltors.
If the building owner’s insurers wanted to absolve themselves of any responsibility to honour coverage of any public liability claim, then we’d gladly go to bat for them big time. Happy to give them all the clippings. The attempts to fix a handful of broken tiles some momths ago – and only after immense pressure from council staff, local pollies and this newspaper – were laughable in the extreme. A
nd if those dodgy escalators are so badly built or poorly installed that both up and down sections can’t be run at the same time, then someone must be made to fix the problem immediately. The Indie over months has observed the aged and the infirm trying to use those stalled escalators. It’s a near impossible chore for some.
This paper once observed a man walk up to the escalators one weekday at 12.15pm – both steps were stalled – and insert the key to start the up escalator. From this, we can only assume there was absolutely nothing wrong with the mechanism of the escalators – or indeed if they had been broken they had been fixed long before. If someone was just saving on power, then they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
The Indie is also entitled to ask what happened in just a few short weeks for City Council to decide it had the powers to force action on the owners of Walton’s. Just a month ago, Lord Mayor Graham Quirk used the pages of this newspaper to declare that council laws simply did not exist to take action against recalcitrant owners. He declared a stern talking to would hopefully do the trick – but he’d enact laws if necessary.
We share local councillor David Hinchliffe’s bewilderment that the strong action that he and many others have called for over many months has now only just been taken.
And a show-cause notice, while commendable, is just the beginning. It’s who wins in the end that counts for the people of Fortitude Valley.
