Agenda
Town Hall, Swanage
on Wednesday, 20th December 2006
at 2.00 p.m.
1. Apologies
2. Minutes of Meeting held 19th July 2006
3. Matters Arising from the Minutes
4. To receive and approve the MCTi Draft Plan – to be presented by Ann Faulkner
(Printed copies will be available upon request)
Please note:
A public consultation & exhibition will be held on 19th January 2007– venue to be decided.
5. To set date for Advisory Forum Public Meeting
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
21 comments:
Draft Plan may be seen at:
http://swanagecommunityplan.blogspot.com/
If it's a plan, where are it's targets?
What a joke. Five years and 50 grand later we have a vision "[We envisage for Swanage to be] A vibrant friendly and welcoming community with a thriving economy in a safe environment, whilst maintaining and enhancing the special character and culture of Swanage and its environs."
Well hallelujah brothers. Can there be a town anywhere on the planet that would not like to have these characteristics? How do we measure vibrancy for goodness sake. What a piece of nonsense.
I agree this totally indecent. Where is the marina, the rail link to Wareham, the sports centre??? people should be taken to task!!!
I do not think we should go down the road of criticising the local people who have been involved in producing this plan. The responsibility lies with the South West Regional Development Authority (SWRDA) which decided some years ago that towns like Swanage should have plans which reflected the views of the community. Unfortunately instead of hiring a competent market research company to find out what people wanted they adopted a "bob a job" approach and tried to get it done by members of the community. Although well intentioned they know nothing about opinion research or planning and so have produced a document which is neither based on robust statistics or contains any concrete means for delivering on the woolly vision statement.
I find it extraordinary that a government body, staffed by apparently qualified experts in economic and social planning should have said 1, it is vitally important to have a plan for the future of the town and 2, we expect a group of total amateurs to develop the expertise to do this and produce the plan at the same time. (community capacity building in the jargon employed by SWRDA). The total budget across the region for this is a couple of million and it has been largely wasted.
I've just visited SWRDA and MCTI.
They admit that Swanage is a partnership town, and that's it.
What's all this about.
A public consultation & exhibition will be held on 19th January 2007– venue to be decided.
Above from the plan.
Consulting on what?
Exhibiting what?
As that's only a month away, how are they going to let us know?
If it's between 8 and 5, when many of us will be at work, how do we make our views known?
I don't even know who 'they' are.
Is it the Swanage Partnership?
Is it MCTI?
Is it SWDRA?
Is it worth it?
The exercise was carried out to discover what the people of Swanage want. According to the analysis of the survey carried out by the partnership which you can reach from one of the links on the right all of 4 respondents were in favour of a marina and 2 were against it. This is hardly a demonstration of a high level of public demand. There is more interest in a rail link but this is going to happen anyway regardless of the town plan.
Sorry, maybe I gave the impression that I hadn't read it - I have.
4 people want a marina, 2 don't.
More than 10,000 people live in Swanage.
A questionairre was sent to a 10% sample of households. Even though it was not exactly scientificaly designed if there was a high level of interest in a marina, either for or against, it would have shown up.
I will probably be castigated for this but to my mind all a survey like this reveals is that people are concerned over the issues the papers tell them they are concerned about, mainly crime and disorder. It is not easy to get people to think beyond the headline issues. Perhaps there is interest in a marina but we have no more than anecdotal evidence for it unfortunately.
As Henry Ford said "if I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse".
I know exactly what you are getting at and I can but agree, however, the town planning exercise was undertaken to find out what the good people of Swanage want and in Ford's memorable phrase, it turned out to be very much a faster horse. Cynics may well argue that the whoe thing was done with this in mind in order to demonstrate that there is no need to spend any money here. It was entirely predicatable that most people would say they would like a little more of the nice things and a bit less of the nasty things. How many have the imagination to suggest anything else?
At the meeting today (20/12) I was informed that the Partnership webiste url is: http://swanagemcti.tripod.com
[previous comment deleted because I put the wrong url -- it doesn't have www but I could only get one page on that site to open..
Is this the Swanage effect?
The link above, and
http://www.swanagecommunityplan.blogspot.com/
seem to be very unreliable.
Will someone post up a link that we can download a hard copy from please. I'm 106 and its too cold to go out.
OK I think this might work. I've tried to set up a download at the Swanage Residents Association website, under Newsletters: http://www.mikehadley.net/swanage/residents/newsletters/index.htm
Soz Mike but the pdf appears blanc.
Sorry Mike
anyone else getting
Unhandled MIME type: “text/plain”
ok think I've fixed it (if only I knew what I was doing)
Thanks Mike.
Post a Comment