You've read this one already. Maybe five times since June. Council puts in meters. Traders say the tills have gone quiet. Someone takes a hammer to a ticket machine. A councillor says the town will die without the money. And then everybody piles into a Facebook group at half eleven at night to explain, at length, in capitals, why everyone else is an idiot.
Tuesday it goes back to the council. Same room, same faces, probably the same arguments.
Though it's worth knowing what Tuesday actually is, because it isn't the reckoning. Councillors are being asked to note an update, note a lessons-learned exercise, and approve a methodology. The real review is being done by the University of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde, costs £66,500, takes nine months, and reports back in June 2027.
So we're the experiment, and we're going to be the experiment for a while yet. Which makes it worth being careful about what we're actually arguing over, because I don't think it's parking.
About those numbers
Councillor Jeremy Findlay walked the High Street and came back with takings down 20% to 60% on last year, one business reckoning they were £1,000 a day light. There's also a survey of 507 people, 18% of whom said they wouldn't come back, 87% of those blaming the charges.
Now. I'd quite like these numbers to be true, because they'd settle things. But they're self-reported, they were collected by people who already knew what answer they wanted, and "I'm never coming back" is roughly the least reliable sentence a human being can produce on a clipboard in July. I've said it about an Ikea car park. I went back a fortnight later.
That doesn't make them nothing. A shopkeeper telling you the till's down 40% knows their till. But you can't hang a policy on it.
The numbers that would actually settle it are, at least, on their way. Footfall. Card spend. How full the bays are, before and after. The evaluation will buy footfall and retail spend data, pull bus boarding figures, use the traffic sensors, and check twelve months before against twelve months after with a control group of comparable towns. That's a proper piece of work.
It's also nine months away, which is a long time if your till is down 40% this August. Until then we're all just describing our own summer and calling it evidence.
Three rows, one row
Here's what I keep coming back to. In eleven weeks this town has managed three separate arguments, and I'm no longer sure they're separate.
There's parking. There's the visitor levy, 5% on paid overnight stays, about £1.2 million a year, consultation open until 18 September, which the community council has already resolved to object to on the grounds that it's a tax on a tax. And underneath both, grinding away for years now, there's holiday lets: 232 of them in town at the last count, 538 bedrooms, something like a third of the town centre, maybe half of certain streets, let out rather than lived in.
Three coats. One issue underneath.
Because a parking space, a flat above a shop and a bed for the night are all the same thing when you squint. A bit of a town centre that isn't getting any bigger, wanted by more people than can have it. And the council only owns one tool. Put a price on it. See who's still standing.
If you want that argument in a single line, it's buried in Appendix B of Tuesday's papers. A short-term let operator gets up to 25 permits a year for their property. A resident gets 20 visitor permits.
The holiday flat is allocated more parking than the family living next door to it.
Both are under review, in fairness, and the hoteliers have asked for something similar, which is reasonable enough. But somebody sat down and wrote those two numbers, and that's what deciding who the town centre is for actually looks like in practice.
The objection to all of it is fair enough: the people who live here end up paying charges designed with day-trippers in mind. Nobody's really answered that.
But there's a trap in it, and I'd rather say so out loud. Argue against pricing in all three at once and what you're defending is the way things are. And the way things are is a town where a two-bed flat is worth more empty in February than it is with a family in it.
The question I'd want asked
Buried in that local research is a figure that went almost entirely unnoticed. A two-bed short-term let is reckoned to generate about £11,600 of local economic value a year. The same flat, lived in, generates about £17,600.
Sit with that for a second. The whole case for visitor accommodation is that tourists spend money and the money is good for us. If those numbers are even in the right postcode, the holiday let is worse on both counts. Fewer neighbours and less money. That's not a trade-off, that's just losing twice.
Which brings me to Tuesday, and the question I'd want asked. It isn't "will you scrap the charges", because that isn't on the agenda and everyone in the room knows it.
It's: where's the money going?
£111,000 in two months. Minus £58,853 of repairs. Minus the two parking attendants the scheme was sold as paying for. Minus £66,500 for the evaluation. I can't tell you what's left, and I don't think many people in town could either. A parking charge that pays for a summer bus, or a park-and-ride, or keeping the seafront that people are driving here to look at in decent nick, is a completely different animal from a parking charge that vanishes into the general fund and is never spoken of again. That gap, I think, is where most of the anger actually lives. Not in the tariff.
If you just want to know what your street costs and where you can still park for nothing, that's a different job and somebody's already done it: the live parking map has every street in the zone, the free options, and how busy the car parks are.
Ask anyone whether they fancy paying to park outside their own butcher and you'll get a short answer. Ask whether they'd wear it if it visibly paid for the bus, and you're having a different conversation entirely. As far as I can tell nobody's put it to us that way. If I've missed it, tell me, and I'll say so next week.
Diary
Council meets Tuesday 25 August at 10am in the Council Chamber at the Town House in Haddington, and it's webcast live if you'd rather watch from the kitchen table. Papers are here. Levy consultation shuts 18 September, and even if it goes ahead the earliest it'd start is spring 2028, so there's rather more time to shape it than the shouting suggests.
If there's a question you think is worth putting, reply and tell me. And if you're there on Tuesday, I'd like to hear what you made of it.