Back to the drawing board on Canal Avenue social housing project

The plan for a 32-unit social housing development at Canal Avenue is going to have to be completely redesigned, Westmeath County Council has revealed.

“Unfortunately, we have run into a difficulty in Canal Avenue in terms of the costs,” council chief executive Barry Kehoe told members of the new council at their inaugural meeting, in June.

Mr Kehoe was responding to a query raised by Cllr Mick Dollard, who sought an update after remarking that now that the Green Party was no longer represented on the council, he imagined there should be more progress on the issue.

The response from Mr Kehoe was not what Cllr Dollard had been hoping for, however. He said: “It’s a good scheme, well designed, but when we document out the entire cost of developing that site, which is a difficult site, unit costs are just too high due to construction inflation and the difficulties on site.”

Mr Kehoe said that the effect of that is that the council will need to undertake a new planning process and undertake a completely new design.

“We will be increasing the number of units that will be provided on the site in order to reduce the unit cost,” he said, explaining that the hope was that when the unit cost is brought down, the council will be able to access funding for the scheme.

Mr Kehoe said the council is currently in the process of procuring new consultants to work on the redesign. “This only came to light in the last couple of weeks and we found we are not going to be able to make progress,” he said.

The apartments that are going to have to be redesigned are surrounded by the area that forms the territory of the Canal Avenue Regeneration Plan, but the apartments are not part of the master plan for the area.

Motor Tax Office

At the same meeting, Cllr Dollard also asked for an update on the former motor taxation office on Church Avenue. “It’s my understanding that there are a number of apartments on the second and third floors and I’m just wondering what the future plans and proposals for that particular building are,” he said.

Mr Kehoe said the council had had a number of serious inquiries in relation to the use of the Motor Taxation Office, but they had unfortunately fallen through.

“We don’t have a strategic use for it ourselves,” Mr Kehoe said, stating that as a result, the council needed to consider the best long-term use of the building, which had been offered to other public service bodies in the area, but nothing had arisen out of that.