Despite the air-conditioning working well, it was stormy in the District Council Chamber tonight!
We had a meeting of the Development Committee tonight. The leader and deputy leader of the council, Terry Cutmore and Keith Hudson were both absent, and they missed quite a bit.
There were two applications that caused the most interest.
The first was for the change of use of a former shellfish packing station in South Fambridge , to be used for the recovery of cars, to be repaired and prepared for exports. If you don’t know South Fambridge, it’s a very quiet, very rural riverside location at the end of a narrow lane:
The actual site is the grey triangle next to the yellow arrow.
Local residents were so concerned about this that probably more than half the population of the village came to the meeting. It was so crowded that one resident even ended up sitting in on one of the Lib Dem spaces on the councillors seats!
Officers were recommending refusal, on the grounds of the effect on the open character of the area and the extra commercial traffic. This was proposed and seconded by ward councillor Tracy Capon and her husband Phil Capon. Chris Black and John Mason added an extra reason – loss of amenity to residents and users of the nearby bridleway.
The application was refused almost unanimously. But two councillors were pretty annoyed at some aspects of how the application was dealt with.
First of all Phil Capon was very critical of how County Highways aren’t concerned about applications like this, saying “It’s about time County Highways got off their backsides and come and look at sites like these- with the amount of council tax people pay it’s time they did more.”
Then John Mason was extremely concerned that a noise analysis report sent in by the applicants wasn’t even mentioned in the officers report on the application. Councillors should be made aware about what evidence had been submitted.
The second item of interest was for a cafe/ restaurant in Great Wakering High Street. Councillor Colin Seagers was outraged – he actually used the word ‘incandescent’ to describe himself. Why? because photos of the High Street he had taken especially for the meeting had been emailed to officers in the officers in the afternoon but weren’t there at the meeting in the evening.
Because of this he actually got the item deferred to the next meeting.
Minor correction – I believe my exact words were ‘as close to incandescent as I have ever been in this Committee’. I have so far succeeded in never BEING ‘incandescent’, as one then tends to lose the plot, not a good idea when one has already been wrong footed by the unexpected unavailability of photographs or other material. I would have taken a memory stick as backup but this had been refused access to the networked PC and AV system in the Civic Chamber on a previous occasion, so I had relied on a self cc of the email with photograph files attached that I sent to two officers to assure myself of its safe sending and receipt.
I have already suggested a future solution via provision of a redundant and non-networked PC reserved solely for an anti-virus programme, which would allow RDC officers to check outside sources of AV material supplied on CD/DVD/memory sticks etc. That system works well in many City institutions where such presentations can then be cleared for safe display on in-house systems.
I think this makes a second time I have agreed with you Cllr Seagers. I should stop making a habit of it.
Councillors should be allowed to produce evidence even if it is at short notice. Having emailed it to two officers in the afternoon, I see no reason they could not be displayed, printed or otherwise distributed. If it is a real issue then why not have a cheap laptop or something similar.
After the meeting I was advised that one should not be surprised that if one were to look at the online records that there would be a “noise report” in associated documentation. Further that the content of the report was subtle in that the recommendation for a “noise management” scheme inferred that there was a noise report.