Agenda and minutes

Councillor Shelton welcomed everyone to the first Freemen Community Meeting and introduced himself and Councillor Keeling.

Councillors will elect a Chair.

Councillor Shelton was Chair for the meeting and informed people that the Chair would alternate between himself and Councillor Keeling for future meetings.

There were no apologies for absence.

The first main item on the programme is Declarations of Interest where Councillors have to say if there's anything in the programme they have a personal interest in.  For example if the Community Meeting wanted to talk about digging up a road and one of the Councillors lived on that road, he or she would have to say they had a personal interest in that.

Councillors are asked to declare any interests they may have in the business on the agenda, and/or indicate that Section 106 of the Local Government Finance Act 1992 applies to them.

There were no declarations of interest.

A brief presentation will be given on the new Community Meetings and what this will mean for residents in the Freemen Ward.

Jerry Connolly gave a presentation on the new Community Meetings and explained how the new system would work. The key features of the new Community Meetings were as follows:

• The meetings provided an opportunity for local people to get more involved in what was happening in their local area.
• Community partners and key agencies such as the Primary Care Trust and the Police would be invited to participate alongside officers from various departments, staff from agencies, projects that had a local base and most importantly people who lived and worked in the Freemen Ward.
• Members of the Public would be encouraged to highlight successes and what was not working well; they would also be encouraged to have their say on their local area such as the needs of the area and how working together could achieve those needs.
• There would be a minimum of four meetings per year, with the possibility of holding other informal events such as patch walks.
• Part of the meeting would consist of information stalls, which would be varied over time. This could include Council services, organisations such as the police or the PCT, or community groups. People could suggest stalls they would like to see.
• The second part of the meeting would be more formal and discuss issues that needed formal decisions such as budget proposals.
• The meeting’s initial task was to identify and prioritise residents’ issues or concerns within their ward.
• The aim was to use these ideas to develop and design a Ward Action Plan.
• In the future the ward would have £10,000 to spend, split between the Ward Action Plan and a ‘community chest’.

Jerry said that work was being done to make publicity of the meetings more effective and asked people to let him know of places that publicity could be sent to.

Members of the public said that they were concerned that the Saffron estate was split between the Eyres Monsell and Freemen Wards.  They also asked that all parts of the ward be considered, not just the estate. Jerry replied that the ward meetings could not change the ward boundaries and that the meeting had to work within the current boundary restrictions. He said, however, that there was the possibility of both community meetings working together on issues that affected parts of both wards if Councillors and the public wished.

Members of the public will have an opportunity to discuss what priorities they would like to see in a new Ward Action Plan.

The meeting split into smaller groups for half an hour and people filled in ‘ward priority cards’ which allowed each person to state the three main things they thought should be included in the Ward Action Plan.

There will be a short feedback session to inform members of the public of some of the main issues that have arisen from the discussion on Ward Priorities.

The Chair asked a person from each table to briefly feed back on their discussions whilst filling in their priority cards. The tables reported issues as follows:

1) Problems with on-street parking, particularly caused by planning permission granted for flats, as the infrastructure could not cope. Rubbish in gardens and streets - streets were cleaned the day before bins emptied.

2) Graffiti, youth provision, school attainment, Councillors to listen to residents, not officers; link in with the Neighbourhood Management plans for the area; Pork Pie Library – shouldn’t lose an iconic building.

3) Antisocial behaviour at Velodrome – Police/Council not accepting responsibility for dealing with it; parking causing problems for buses, and therefore the elderly; smelly drains.

4) Provision of diversionary measures for young people eg education, arts, training; parking enforcement, street cleaning and litter, wheelie bin enforcement; drugs activity; private landlords not looking after their properties.

The Chair informed people that they could always let Councillors know of any problems and then they could investigate for them. He said that the priority cads would be looked at and the five main issues would be identified for the Ward Action Plan.

The following dates were provisionally agreed for future meetings. All meetings to start at 6.00pm.

Wednesday 3 September 2008 (possibly at Linwood Centre)

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Wednesday 4 March 2009

The formal part of the meeting closed at 7.43 pm and people were given the opportunity to continue to look at the information fair stalls.