Planning parking with eyes closed
The news WNDC has approved its own Innovation Centre on Black Lion Hill is of great concern to the long suffering residents of St James.
The assumption by the planning department at WNDC that the parking arrangements are acceptable is bizarre. It certainly isn’t acceptable to residents of St James, none of whom have been consulted on this proposal.
The application only considers parking issues in Green Street, conveniently ignoring several facts. While it is laudable and desirable for everyone to use a sustainable transport model to get to work, it is totally unrealistic to assume people will do so; it’s completely preposterous to assume if they do drive they will pay to use the inflated prices at the station or the public car parks.
What is not sustainable, however, is an assumption that anyone will actually find a car park space at the station, let alone the public car parks. Jimmy’s Enders know the truth of what will happen; commuters will not pay the high charges, and will join the others who work in town and park in the back streets of St James.
At meetings, continually residents complain of their streets being clogged with commuter parking and have requested many times that the county council imposes parking restrictions. These are all but ignored. Inconsiderate and dangerous parking are part of the parking nightmare that is St James.
Just how does this fit into the overall plan for managing parking in the area, if such a plan exists, or will every building in the Waterside area have only three spaces?
This is planning with eyes closed. Quite how an unelected quango, that is due to be wound up, can continue passing applications submitted by itself, to the detriment of non-consulted people is, frankly, unacceptable.
John Connolly, Chairman,
Graham Croucher, Secretary,
St James Residents’ Association,
Northampton.
Everything is under one roof
The proposed plans are not for a bus station just several glorified bus stops. I use the bus station every day and cannot see why people want to get rid of it and say it is not good enough.
Do these people actually use the bus station? The buses are all in one place, for example if you have a connection to catch it’s all under one roof and it is also easily accessible to the shops.
At the new station if you have to catch another bus it’s not always going to be departing from the Fishmarket.
As it stands in the Grosvenor Centre there are shops unoccupied. Argos and Jane Norman are unoccupied in Abington Street. There are enough unoccupied shops, we don’t need more.
The current businesses will also be affected if the new plans go ahead. People are not going to want to buy their shopping in Sainsbury’s and carry it to the Fishmarket, especially old people.
It doesn’t bear thinking about the amount of school children that will be crammed into a small insecure area as the current bus station is bad enough as it is. We are going back to the days of waiting in the streets for the buses.
The new bus station will be surrounded by pubs and I will not be using it at night, fearing the fallout from the pubs.
I have only ever heard of arguments against demolishing the current bus station and not for it.
As it’s been said before by the majority of bus users all the current site needs is a lick of paint and better maintenance. If maintenance and cleaning was carried out when needed we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Judith Harrison,
Hazeldene Road, Links View, Northampton.
Confusing two separate issues
The letter from the Save our Services correspondent confuses two separate issues, and in doing so, lets the Conservatives off the hook for messing up the sale of school sites, which has cost the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds.
The Liberal Democrats are, rightly, criticising the Conservative leaders at County Hall as, if they had listened to what the Lib Dems said in the first place, there would be much more money to deal with the cuts that are happening now to PCSOs, street lights, libraries and care services.
The Conservatives gambled and lost and communities are seeing the result.
On the completely separate schools PFI issue, I would be interested to know what your correspondent would have done.
As it was the Labour government (nothing at all to do with the coalition) made it clear the only way to improve schools was to go down this route.
Whilst the Liberal Democrats are generally opposed to PFI, we do not think it is right to put political dogma before the education of our county’s children. To have turned down the money in some petty attempt to prove a political point would have left our county’s children in crumbling schools.
It seems sad Save our Services care more about attacking people who they should be working with to stop some of the cuts locally, than they do about our children’s future or the massive waste of taxpayers’ money in the botched school sites deal. Perhaps if they concentrated on saving our services, instead of political dogma, we would all be better off.
Councillor Sally Beardsworth,
Liberal Democrat, Kingsthorpe division, Northamptonshire County Council.
Attention drawn away from facts
My thanks go to Mr Evans and Mrs Taylor (ViewPoint, January 26) for confirming my point that the public has been misled by the Conservatives about Franklin’s Gardens.
I was never asked to take part in the traffic management trial to which Mr Evans refers, highways issues being the county council’s responsibility.
I would have been happy to contribute and could have drawn attention to points which the trial could have resolved, but which were overlooked.
The Claret car park is owned by the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) and transfer of ownership to Northampton Borough Council is held up with legal issues. This is a regular topic of discussion at meetings of St James Residents’ Association.
The Saints’ proposed planning application has sat on the drawing board since May 2009. Dates for its submission have come and gone: November 2009, July 2010, August 2010 and spring 2011.
So, given the urgency which has been expressed, every day’s delay further exposes the untrue nature of criticisms levelled at the previous Lib Dem administration.
Mrs Taylor has misunderstood the reasons why the Heineken Cup game against Munster was played at Milton Keynes, again emphasises how easily the public can be misled.
It has been accepted this was a commercial decision made by the Saints and their plans for a 17,000 seat stadium would still have left Franklin’s Gardens 5,220 seats adrift of the recorded 22,220 fans that travelled to MK.
The Conservatives want the public’s focus to be on Franklin’s Gardens to distract attention from hard-to-swallow cuts – switching off lights, cutting funding for PCSOs and reducing monitoring of CCTV, hitting the most at risk in our society by creating uncertainty over security of tenancy for the elderly in care homes, cutting support for those with mental health issues and closing the toy library service, to name but a few.
Pam Varnsverry,
Delapre, Northampton.
Already a victim of Aufona’s pen
My one pledge for my four-year tenure was to stay out of the clutches of Aufona and the very sharp pen that can cut a person to pieces. Oh dear I have failed in my first year. I have now sacked my IT person.
Since my return in September I have had over 300 emails from residents, other authorities, businesses and spam (mostly spam).
I had my computer programmed to reject and block anything that came from Aufona (joke!).
On a serious note perhaps you should try again as I am very curious as to why you wanted to email me in the first place.
Councillor Mick Ford,
Chairman Far Cotton Residents’ Association, Chairman of Friends of Delapre Abbey,
Life member of Sixfields Trust.
Email to a friend
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