Toowoomba Regional Council reacts to people’s concerns over its trial cut to community room hours

Toowoomba Regional Council has made some amendments to its trial reduction in opening hours at the city library’s community rooms.

Toowoomba Regional Council has reassessed its approach to a trial reduction in opening hours at the Toowoomba City Library community rooms.

The council had announced it was trialling new hours for the rooms, which effectively meant any organisations who wanted to book the rooms outside of standard business hours on weekdays were unable to do so.

Responding to The Chronicle’s front page about the issue on Monday and “very loud and very vocal and very passionate” feedback, Environment and Community Services general manager Nick Hauser told councillors at Tuesday’s Ordinary Council Meeting that the council’s approach to the trial was being reassessed.

Under the trial, existing bookings for the rooms outside of the new hours of operation were being honoured.

Mr Hauser said on occasions where there were existing bookings, the council would also accept new bookings for those timeslots.

TRC have made decision to close the community rooms at the Toowoomba Regional Library at 5pm each day making them unavailable for many community groups who use the facilities in the evening. Margaret Marshall, is a member of Toastmasters a group that will now need to find an alternative venue.

“It makes sense – we’re open, we’re staffed, we’ll honour existing bookings, so if people would like to make a booking at the same time, we’ll accept those bookings,” he said.

Mr Hauser said the council would also go back and look at any room requests that had been rejected, and if they lined up with an existing booking, contact the potential hirers to let them know the venues were now available.

Mr Hauser also committed to an assessment of demand “to see if there’s a couple of nights or more that we need to be open and accept bookings through that time,” he said.

“So I’d just like to say I guess we’ve heard the feedback we’ve received in the short three weeks until now, and we’ll continue to monitor that.

“We’ll also undertake some surveys of the community.”

Cr Nancy Sommerfield said she was “really surprised that this trial, as its called, just went ahead … you know, it just happened”.

Mr Hauser said there would be surveys and some of that would be contact with regular users and past hirers, as well as using the booking process to understand demand.

Cr McMahon said there was “certainly a lot of community concern” about the reduction in hours of operation of the community rooms and thanked Mr Hauser for addressing the issue.