I do not know it is true, false, or partly true but it is a brilliant piece of imaginative writing and it transfixed me this morning for over an hour
Local Public meeting
This evening we went along to an open evening run by a counselor Shaun Hughes, one of the unpaid people who run an aspect of the services provided in Midsomer Norton. The meeting was held in Welton Rovers on North Road and was attended by about 20 people.
Shaun had spent significant time doing good graphics
The meeting lasted for two hours and I realized not long into the meeting how complicated the running of any town or city is. Some finances are controlled by the area authority, some by the regional authority, and some by the local council.
The agenda started with two local police officers saying that at any one time they had five people on duty covering Bath, Frome and parts of North Somerset apart from the local area.
The supervising officer said that the number of his colleagues had more than halved in the last year because not so many people want to become police officers. He said that if you phone 101 you should always follow this up with an email so that if the case slips through the net it can be followed up locally.
Everything was up for discussion and we talked about noisy cars. Evidently the noise level currently allowed his 72 decibels which will go down to 68 decibels in a year’s time. Noise is a prosecutable offense but they don’t have the equipment at the moment to measure it thought there was talk of loaning a machine from an adjacent authority.
It should be said that when the two police representatives had finished their talk they received a spontaneous round of applause.
They spoke about Labor’s pledge to build 1.5 million houses of which our share was 27,000. It is quite clear that new towns will have to be created because you cannot build for example in Bath because there is basically no more room.
Questions were asked about solar panels. There are plans for a large farm east of Paulton. I did not mention the Labour party plan for experimenting with dimming the sun by spraying the sky (£50m for a trial).
We talked about the painting of single and double yellow lines. One resident had been trying to get lines painted for two years. Someone else proposed jokingly that we everyone should get there paints out of their garages and do it ourselves but I responded promptly that this was not the right type of paint.
There was talk about losing grants for a school, residential during the week, for special needs children. The council had announced that is in spite of rave reviews by offstead, funding would cease from September this year. The problem is without the school which offers residents from Monday morning to Friday evening, if this closes the alternatives will be much more expensive.
Anyway I’m sure this is not wildly interesting to all my non local my readers but I’m just showing you the variety of things that I found most interesting to listen to, because I didn’t realize the procedures, the time periods, the permissions, the annual budgets and advanced plans, the endless meetings that are required to get anything going.
At the end I said to Sean that he should put up a notice saying ‘don’t shoot the messenger’. He did a great job and I thanked him profusely.. To repeat –Â he is not paid.
