Ulverston Town Centre Future

The last meeting of the series of confusing public consultations by the County Council concluded last Thursday.

I can understand why you stayed away, even though some important decisions were made!

However, everyone who attended worked extremely hard - the councillors especially - and the best of a bad job was achieved.

On Thursday, attendance dropped to the lowest of the three meetings, with 8 members of the public, 7 SLDC Councillors, most of whom were also Town Cllrs, 3 Town Councillors and the 2 County Councillors, Wendy Kolbe and Pauline Halfpenny. The presentation was by Highways officer Nick Raymond, the whole process organised by Debbie Binch.

In the words of one of the most involved people from the community who had been to every meeting:

"It was a farce"

Witnessing how the proceedings were carried out, it is easy to sympathise with the public who stayed away.

Some positive things came out nevertheless, but even at the end we came away without ever having had the details of the process explained to us, even though there had been many requests for explanations.

It is true that the process was a complicated struggle to accomodate both the wishes of the town and those of the government, however this process was never explained properly.

It did not help that the chair kept trying to move the discussion on and offered some simplistic solutions when those present insisted on understanding as much as possible and coming to knowledgable solutions. The offer of the chair to leave the details to be decided by the County Cllrs and the Highways officer was wisely rejected.

There was a dogged determination in the audience not to want to go home until the best decisions possible were achieved.

Had the County Cllrs themselves understood the process, they could have help us through it.

The impression given by Nick Raymond was that this was something to get through with the minimum of explanation and that his ideas of what we and the government wanted should go forward with the minimum fuss. He had all the power and we were only able to modify his decisions slightly because of a lack of understanding and the limited time available.

The way our proposals were scored was never explained to my satisfaction and I am even now trying to determine from the officers how they arrived at their recommendations.

As someone with reasonable intelligence who attended all three meetings, I failed to understand the criteria.

It appeared that any mere suggestion that fitted government targets was accepted, even though we had given it a zero score as no one actually recommended it. Whereas, even when an item had our full approval with a score of 4, by the time it had been interpreted by Nick Raymond as being against government guidlines, it was damned to the dustbin.

Had we understood this system of marking suggestions and been given the opportunity to contribute suggestions that would be given government brownie points, the result could have been considerably different.

For instance had it been suggested that we revert to using horses and carts, I suspect this would have been scored way above anything else. Why didn't we go for this? Then we could have diverted all the funds away from Kendal with Ulverston taking pride of place as the most environmentally friendly town in the county. Now I come to think of it, there's a fair bit of grass growing between the cobbles. Did we get full marks for this?

Thus we will continue to have an empty car Park at Stockbridge Lane with no signs to it because erecting signs was seen as promoting the use of the car rather than relieving the pain of crowded parking on our narrow streets like Burlington and Ainslie street.

Mad.

In addition, we were expected to accept the outrageous costs of County Council work without question : £2,500 for two information boards for the town centre with bus and train times!