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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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8th October '06
I really had to chuckle at last week’s letter page which was dominated by correspondence about the new ‘stones sculpture’ on the new Barnstaple roundabout. I especially liked the clever reader who invented the word ‘Moanhenge’ to describe the whole on-going controversy. Personally I think they are amazingly ugly and pointless – a bit like the new bridge – but even more intriguing was the admission by Brian Greenslade that the cost of the overall scheme was now at £42.3 million. I seem to remember it was going to cost a lot less when it was first begun. I only mention this as with costs like this there is clearly going to be a major hole in the county’s road building budget – so much so that the prospect of any new upstream bridge in Bideford is fast receding into the middle of the century – if not further back!
So the proposed CCTV camera at East-the-Water is to be delayed until funds are available. Councillor Church, who lives near the old station, has suggested the camera be put up in that area as crimes from ‘vandalism to drug dealing’ are common there. As she noted the area is the nearest spot outside the town centre without CCTV and thus the lowlifes and sad druggies congregate there. Of course if a CCTV camera is placed there it will probably just displace them to somewhere else – possibly further along the Tarka Trail or up to Chudleigh Fort. The only lasting answer, of course, is to provide jobs in the town so that young people have some career to look forward to rather than just hanging around and falling into the dead end rut of drug dependency. The shame is that all that seems to be on offer to the town at the moment is many hundred more houses. If the provision of jobs at Caddsdown and in the planned new shops doesn’t keep up with demand then will we find ourselves talking about ever more CCTV cameras? Let’s hope we can get the timing of future development right.
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