Council Meeting - Recycling, Cattle Market and Car Park

The recycling area at the Co-op is about to close down - it only made about £200 last year for Cusop Council, so it's not worth continuing with it.
This means, of course, that anyone who was using the Co-op recycling bins will now be coming to Hay Car Park, which is the nearest recycling site. This site makes quite a bit of money for Hay Council, which is used as grant money for local schemes - any local project can apply. The only problem here is that the bins don't get emptied often enough, and are sometimes full to overflowing, so that will have to be monitored so that the lorries come to pick up the bins more regularly. The bins for cardboard, in particular, are heavily used now, and Hay could do with more bins for that.

The councillors discussed alternative sites for recycling around Hay. Steve Like suggested the Cattle Market car park. Any site they choose will have to have good access for the lorries that collect the bins, of course. Hay Council have already been approached to take over the tump at the edge of the Cattle Market site, next to the path that runs down to the riverside near St Mary's Church. The people who run the cattle market, Brightwells, say that the paddock that was used for pony sales is no longer in use, so that's some extra ground that might be available.
Steve Like was of the opinion that the cattle market would not be there in ten years time - or twenty at the outside - so this is a large area of land and sheds that the Council should keep an eye on so it can be used to the benefit of the town when the time comes, and not snapped up by some developer for more luxury housing. There's potential with the sheds for light industrial use, for instance, and having the recycling facilities there would be a good start. However, there are no plans to move the recycling facilities at the moment.

The car park was discussed earlier in the meeting - now that a percentage of the takings is coming to Hay Council, they want to be very sure of their responsibilities. For instance, Powys County Council should continue to do resurfacing and relining of the car park, when required. Fiona Howard mentioned the building of the new primary school - should it ever happen - as the only access to the site is across the car park, so heavy machinery would be trundling up and down and probably parking there, too. The estimate is that the new school would take a year to build (at the moment the timetable is from next January to the following January) so that would reduce the income from the car park for the area that the machinery needs to park on.

Apparently, the deal that Hay managed to strike with Powys is a pretty good one, and other local councils are watching how it works out in practice with interest, to see if they could get a similar deal.