more Country Park proposals

Written: 09/06/06

This was discussed at yesterday's cabinet meeting at SCDC. Your district councillors were in attendance and I was in the cheap seats to keep an eye on proceedings. Cllr Roberts, who you may remember was the portfolio holder who led the meeting in the Country Park at the start of the year, has moved on now and instead we have Cllr Vicky Ford.

She was very positive about the park and suggested promoting the park more actively with brown tourist signs on the A14, improved catering and ... the sting in the tail ... car parking charges, at least on an experimental basis.

However the reaction of councillors, both on cabinet and from the floor was pretty hostile to this. Several of the strongest speakers, including Cllr Spink (Tory, Deputy Leader of the council) and Cllr Kindersley (Lib Dem, ex Leader of the council) felt strongly that rather than continuing to look at ways on enhancing revenue itself SCDC should simply be getting on with doing something to rid itself of the financial burden of the park which was only of benefit to a very small proportion of SCDC residents (i.e. us here in Milton) and local City Council residents.

I did rather feel that she was ambushed: she's very new, she's only been on the council for a few weeks (but she's a Tory high flyer and is number 32 on Cameron's A-list (allegedly), which I suspect is why she was given a place on cabinet), so she didn't know about the roasting Deb Roberts had when she brought similar proposals to the last meeting. I'm slightly surprised she wasn't warned by some of her Tory colleagues however.

Anyway cabinet left it that she would come back with a definite proposal for consideration by their September meeting.

There are already several options on the table from other parties for reducing the financial burden on SCDC, details of which you can find on the SCDC web site if you're interested - look under Milton Country Park Advisory Group minutes. A Community Trust model is the one favoured by both the parish council and also, in a somewhat different format, by Cambridge Mencap. That's still on the table so we will be pursuing that over the next few months.
 

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