Showing posts with label Involving and informing the public. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Involving and informing the public. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Cllr Richard Gale, Rutland Anti Corruption, Involving and informing the public


Involving and informing the public

Tags: openness
It’s basic, the Council is elected by the taxpayers to represent them in the best democratic 
way it can. Every Councillor has a voice and if they want to ask questions they should without 
the abuse and defamation the Rutland Anti-Corruption Group has endured over the last year.
If the largest group choose to delegate additional duties and responsibilities to the Chief Executive 
and the Portfolio holder for Finance and Asset management, fine. However, as an elected councillor 
I am entitled to follow events and know what negotiations have taken place and with whom on a 
regular basis.
I was not permitted to be part of the negotiations for projects in my ward but later asked to 
see the minutes of the meetings with individual land owners and developers but was prevented. 
For me this was the start of the current unjustifiable and extraordinary attacks upon the 
RAC Group, hence the call for Openness and Transparency.
What is the full and true reasoning to move the Post 16 College away from town? Why accept a significant reduction in the numbers of affordable homes on the Hawksmeade development? 
Can the public please be shown the evidence that supported this reduction when other 
development sites can provide 35% in the same economic climate?
Why does the majority group seem to support the ‘flexing’ of planning just to give a 
developer a greater value when this flexing significantly reduces public access to sports field, 
recreation land and important open space?
The Barleythorpe Road site amounts to four and a half acres, why does it need to be five 
and a half acres unless there is a ‘hidden’ reason? Is the undisclosed plan to place a 
supermarket here although Planning Officers have identified other suitable site close by?
I ask the Council to answer these questions, make all the answers available to the wider 
public before we go any further. There is nothing wrong with having suspicions. What is wrong 
is when the answers to the questions to support or dispel those suspicions are withheld.