Glossopdale Area Forum
Last Thursday saw a meeting of the Glossopdale Area Forum which took place at the Glossop site of Glossopdale School.
The meeting started off with updates from Dai Larner the Council's strategic director for Regeneration on some of the issue's raised at the previous forum which discussed regeneration in Hadfield.
The meeting then moved on to the first of two question sessions, the first of which saw a number of concerns raised by local traders in the centre of Glossop with regards to problems over parking since the various set of road works and improvements started earlier this year.
The traders who had collected a petition of over 700 names, were asking for the council to give consideration to free parking within Glossop for the duration of the works to assist in raising shopper confidence in coming to Glossop to shop following the problems with parking since the start of the work's.
The initial response from the council was given by Dai Larner stating that the majority of the current works are intended to improve the town centre and that they are trying as much as possible to minimise the disruption caused by the works, and if they were to cut the fees for parking the 'money' would need to come from somewhere.
There was no response from the political leadership of the council as for the first time since the area forums have started there were no members of the council's executive in attendance.
In fact as a whole given the apparent place of the area forums in the council's consultations plans Thursdays meeting had a poor attendance from Glossopdale's elected members with around half of Glossopdale's councillors not in attendance, and with no section for apologies at the meeting no guidance on those indicating they were unable to attend as opposed to those just not attending.
Whitfield Councillor Graham Oakley queried about the removal of all the trees from the slope near the heritage centre, Dai Larner replied that the contractors had mis-read the instructions and that the contractors had apologised and would replace the trees and were now been more closely monitored.
The meeting then moved on to a presentation from Adrian Fisher the council's head of 'planning' over the future development plans for the High Peak area. Full consultation will start on the 8th November via the usual methods but attendees to the area forum were asked to take part in an exercise looking at some of the future needs for Glossopdale and the High Peak.
The meeting then drew to a close with a brief presentation from Amanda Watson of the County Council on the changes that will be taking place to the setup for the enforcement of parking regulation both for on street and off street (car parks) parking, which will at some point mid 2008 will transfer from the police to the local council's which will hopefully improve the situation with regards to parking enforcement.