Council Meeting - Recycling and Development Plans

Getting onto the main meeting, after the presentations, there was a discussion of the Recycling Fund. The Fund is getting less money that it used to, because bottles and glass are now being collected from people's front doors around Hay, so they don't have to take them up to the car park to recycle. Convenient for householders, but a bit of a problem for the Council, as they were making money from it to give out in grants to local projects. However, people are bringing a lot of heavy cardboard to be recycled at the car park, so there was a suggestion that an extra container for cardboard should be asked for, and one for bottles discontinued.
There had also been a request from the Affordable Housing Group for a grant to pay someone to sort out a website and do various administrative tasks. This was refused by the sub-committee on the grounds that local councillors had to do it for nothing so why shouldn't the Affordable Housing Group? A vote of the full council still came down on the side of refusal of the grant.
After looking at the prices of notice boards, Alan Powell has generously offered to make one and donate it to the Council, as he is a carpenter.
The Swan will be booked for the old people's Christmas Party again, though there was a bit of quibbling over the cost of the wine last year.
There is still concern about the transfer of assets from the County Council to the Town Council, with all the expense that this would entail - when the Cemetery Lodge was sold, the money from the sale was supposed to go towards buying the extra land needed at the top of the cemetery - and nobody on the Town Council knows what happened to that money.
They also need to talk to the representatives of the various sports clubs around Hay.

And then we came to the Persimmon Homes plan to build 80 houses on the edge of town.
The Town Council is concerned about drainage problems, and want to know how local amenities like the doctors' surgery and the school will cope with the influx of 80 new families to the area. It was pointed out that it's not Persimmon Homes that are at fault here - it's the Local Development Plan. There are two Local Development Plans - one for the National Parks and one for the County Council, and neither seem to have taken the local infrastructure into account when deciding where new houses can be built. Members of the Council felt that their views had not been taken into account properly, and that they hadn't been told everything they needed to know when they put their views forward for the making of the Plans.
There was also the issue of affordable housing as part of the development. The Millbank development was supposed to include affordable homes, but none have been built, and the developers there have paid a certain amount to the County Council to off-set their lack of promised provision. Which is fine for the County Council, but not so good for local people who need affordable homes.
During all this discussion, one of the councillors was not allowed to speak, or vote, because of a conflict of interests. She is also the leader of the protest group against the LDP and against this development. This is standard practice, and legally required. However, two of the members of the public who were still there were horrified that this was the case, and the councillor herself left the meeting just after the vote, saying she felt unwell.