Today I’ve been chasing up a couple of things. The missing street signs on Butterstile Lane and Carr Avenue remain AWOL. I was told six weeks ago that it would take ten weeks to replace them. I refuse to believe this, since it would take me less time to enrol on and complete a metalwork course and make the damn things myself. So I have been prodding the Highways Department about that today.

In addition, I noticed this morning that the sign at the end of my own road can no longer be read since it has been overcome by nasty-looking thorned weeds. So I asked them to sort that out too, whilst they’re in the area. I’d do it myself but there are nettles and I am delicate…

Later on this week there’s the next meeting of the St Mary’s Conservation Area working group. I am looking forward to finding out the latest plans for this important local area.

One of the issues involved for anyone living in the area is around buildings and planning, which reminded ne today to chase up the planning application for the site of the former Park Hotel on Lowther Road. This site has been derelict for a few years since the pub was knocked down, and now there has been an application received for some flats. I think that opinion may be divided on this one – we don’t want a building site, but not many people like flats, especially if they’re overly tall. So I am talking to a resident with concerns, and would be happy to hear any others. We need to make sure that whatever happens, the development minimises its impact on the surrounding homes – i.e. enough car parking spaces, retention of privacy and light for existing residents, and a commitment to actually build something rather than keep the land vacant for years.

I’ll put any updates on here as they arrive.

Rick

A couple of weeks ago I shrieked around the district in triumph having secured the construction of a bollard at the top of Dashwood Road. I had been trying to get it in place for about six months, and had strangled myself in more red tape than it would take to gift-wrap the Eiffel Tower. But a local resident and I got there in the end. God bless the Council and its lightning reflexes.

Today someone reversed into it, knocking it down, before driving off. Which was fairly irritating.

Thankfully someone got his number-plate, which I have passed on to the Police. I don’t know if wanton bollard destruction is a crime, but I hope so because he has deflated me somewhat, and thus deserves the type of punishment metered out to errant slaves in Roman times.

It is doubly bad because I am on day two of my “bikini fit” diet today, and in absolutely no mood for irritants. The first stage of the diet is a “detox,” which is apparently supposed to make you feel better by removing from your diet all solid foods for 48 hours. So I haven’t eaten anything requiring the use of teeth since Saturday evening, and am feeling the strain. Yesterday I was only allowed water. Today I have progressed to water and smoothies. Tomorrow I am on solids again, but only fruit.

I work with nurses and they doubt the healthiness of my choice. I doubt my own sanity, and would genuinely kill for a bag of crisps. And not just a stranger. I would kill a friend.

But the women in the book look good in bikinis, and since I am too lazy to find a diet for men, this will have to do for now.

Whether it works or not will be interesting. But regardless, if they catch the bollard murderer I will suggest to the judge that he don his black hat and sentence him to a fortnight of bikini fitness dieting. That’ll teach him.

Rick

I have just been out leafleting and once again had the distinct misfortune to find myself on Knowle Drive, the great forgotten road in my ward, the surface of which is not at all dis-similar to the surface of the Moon.

Numerous residents of this little street have complained to me and to colleagues about the state of the road before. And another one collared me today. I agree with their views entirely. Having been asked to stump up ever-increasing amounts of tax, they are within their rights to expect to drive from one end of their road to the other without feeling like they’re in a giant tumble dryer.

The annoying part for me is that there’s very little I can say beyond “I agree 100% with what you’re saying.” I must have asked the Council half a dozen times or more for their assistance with this road. But as I have mentioned on here before, the entire budget for minor road repairs for Prestwich in 2008-9 is £108,000, and the single neediest road costs one and a half times this amount. Without something radical, the people of Knowle Drive have got about as much chance of seeing their road satisfactorily repaired as I do of winning Wimbeldon.

Which, for local people, is hugely annoying and begs the oft-repeated question “where does all the money go?” I know that the answer to this is fantastically complicated, and that the oft-repeated “answer” that it is all wasted on asylum seekers and managers is entirely false. But for me, the lack of understanding and the huge amount of frustration that the ongoing inaction fosters amongst local people highlights a bigger worry - a complete lack of communication from the Council about why priorities are the way they are.

I try to explain local residents about the increasing cost of social care, say, and the investment in Children’s Services. But I can’t do it half as well as the Council could, by showing people that the reason their road hasn’t been done this year is because we’ve recruited a dozen new care co-ordinators instead, and as a result 100 more elderly people are being cared for at home. They mightn’t be happy about the road, but at least they’d understand why. At the moment there isn’t even that, and there’s resentment growing.

I read Council communications, and they don’t do the job. They tell half a tale, stressing the positives without ever talking about the sacrifices. They treat Council Tax payers as children, with a patronising dis-regard which never comes near to discussion of a real issue. It has to change. When I write St Mary’s Focus I try and put both sides of the story, because it’s rare that there’s an issue simple enough to be dealt with in a line or two. But the Council, and the national government as well, brush argument and difficulty under the carpet with sham “consultations” and phony words which are designed to win people round but in reality do the reverse. Why are they so scared of telling the whole story?

For the time being all I have for Knowle Drive is a shrug of agreement and the will to somehow pester the Council enough to have them pay for the repairs to shut me up. It’s not really all I should have up my sleeve.

Rick

Occasionally the struggle to get little things achieved in my ward vastly outweighs the small-time reality of what it is I am trying to do. Today’s successful installation of bollards on Kingswood / Dashwood Road is the perfect case in point.

One night about six months ago I noticed the world’s single largest HGV trying to do a three point turn down the residential side-street that is Dashwood Road. This monster truck was, seriously, about thrice the width of the road, resplendent with more bright light bulbs than the Blackpool Illuminations, and almost certainly possessing a horn of such magnitude that a single honk would have de-forested Prestwich Clough.

This was just the latest in a string of trucks getting stuck down that road, having fallen foul of giggling sat-nav machines mischievously mis-directing their hapless drivers on the way to somewhere else. And obviously the local residents were getting mighty fed-up of their cars being de-wing-mirrored , their walls being knocked down, and their sanity sorely tested.

One such Dashwood-dweller asked whether I could sort out a bollard, which would deter the truck drivers from attempting the three-point turns, and have them driving round the block instead.

An easy task you might think, since a bollard costs £200 and the Council’s budget is £250,000,000. Sadly, this would prove not to be the case, and it is only now, half a year and several threats to pay for the blasted thing myself, that we finally have the Richard Baum Bureaucracy Gone Mad Memorial Bollard unveiled to the waiting world.

The delays were unfathomable. Partly because Council officers gave this absolutely no priority (which is understandable when there are major junctions that need completely re-building, but frustrating nonetheless), but mainly I think because the lines of communication between Finance and Highways are as frayed as a tatty old rope bridge. It took more to-ing and fro-ing than it is almost possible to believe to get this done. But get it done we did. And I am proud.

Unfortunately we are only half way there. The symptom has been attacked, but the cause has not. I wrote to the business to whom the trucks are attempting to deliver, advising them that their lorries were being guided by the sat-nav equivalent of “Number 5” from the Short Circuit films. They assured me that they would take care of it, but they clearly haven’t because the drivers still travel ever more irretrievably into suburbia before realising that a 40 foot truck probably shouldn’t be driving down a narrow street of terraced housing in the middle of the night.

So I have asked for the Council to install signs to tell drivers to ignore their Sat Navs. I am told that such signs don’t exist, but I know that they do because I’ve seen them with my own eyes in such exotic locations as Ashton under Lyne.

Their installation will be another nail in the coffin of despair for local people, but will probably take at least another six months to get done, because nothing’s ever simple, and we’re already starting from a fairly unpromising point whereby the Council flat-out denies that the signs even exist!

And of course I await with baited breath the necessary removal of the new bollards when a truck tries to three point turn anyway and gets utterly stuck.

Rick

Well the clocks went forward last night. It was the first such shift in time since we moved house, and I have to say I was shocked by the number of clocks we have in the house. Fourteen, to be precise, not including my watch. I think that’s pretty unnecessary… Still, at least I remembered the correct direction in which to turn them all. A couple of years back I turned them back at this time of year, and was thus two hours behind the rest of Britain for most of a day, until it got dark in the middle of the afternoon and I realised something was awry. At first, I must admit, I thought the world was ending. Then it occurred to me that I’d made a simple time-keeping error. I am still faintly disconcerted to think that the first emotion that struck me after realising we weren’t all doomed was one of disappointment that my Casio was wrong.

Days like this are odd though. Although we’ve only shifted forward an hour, I do feel a bit confused. More tired than I should, and slightly bitter that an hour has been stolen from me, at election time when I need it most. I don’t want it back in September when it’s cold and wet! I want it back now!

This morning I was woken at some time between 7.30 and 10.30, depending on which clock I was looking at, by a resident concerned about the St Ann’s Road junction improvement. Whilst I think we’re all glad that this is being sorted, and that the dangerous junction will now be repaired, there seems to be an awful lot of work going on there to do what strikes me as not the world’s most complicated job (which, as I established last night, is actually changing the clock setting on my DAB radio).

The street, I am told, has been dug up three times in a week, which is not only annoying to locals but also seems a bit of a waste of resource. In addition, work has been going on at the weekends for the past fortnight, starting very early. And this is annoying to residents too, who seem to have received little in the way of communication from the Council. So I have emailed the officers concerned this morning, and will contact them when they’re in work tomorrow, expressing my concerns over this work. It is important that we get the junction done properly and made safer, but it’s equally important that we do it showing concern for local people who have to live there whilst the work is carried out.

Now, it’s early / mid / late morning, so I must go and have either breakfast or lunch.

Rick

Today I have investigated an issue in my role as a governor of Butterstile Primary School, trying to make sure that a couple of children there don’t miss out on some Christmas festivities. I have spoken to a couple of other governors about it, and liaised with the Head, so now hopefully everyone will be happy and merry and full of festive joy.

Also today I have spoken to a resident about the state of his road - it’s only a couple of months until we have the impossible task of selecting which of the ward’s pot-holed roads receive the tiny amount of money available for maintenance in the coming year. Last year the amount of money needed just to refurbish the dozen neediest roads was five times the amount available. God only knows what the situation will be this year, but certainly nowhere near enough to fix them all. I had to tell the resident that his road would make the long-list for the second successive year, but that it mightn’t make it onto the final list. I had to agree with his assessment that short-term thinking like this leads to bigger problems in the long term. It’s frustrating that there’s little I can do but watch the cracks in the road get bigger!

And tonight, I am getting my photo taken. The new Focus (festive Christmas edition) is on its way shortly, and of course it won’t be complete without pictures of Donal O’Hanlon and I pointing at things. So that’s what we’re doing tonight, joined by Mary D’Albert, the Lib Dem Focus Team candidate for St Mary’s in 2008. I’m just off to fetch my Brylcreem…

Rick

Today I have been chasing up a lot of issues on behalf of residents.

I have been in touch with the company developing Tulle Court to ask them whether or not they are going to renovate the unadopted road next to the development.

I have added some trees which are in need of pruning on Church Drive to the list which the Council has to prune back. Unfortunately this list is so long that the trees may well grow into mighty specimens, entirely overwhelm the district, and then die of their own accord before they are pruned back. But we can but try, and keep the pressure on.

I have also had some good news this morning about the road markings at the corner of Butterstile Lane and Bury New Road, which have faded to such a degree that I fear that soon locals may begin to see apparitions of the faces of deities in the road surface. Regardless of this development, it is dangerous at the moment, especially at night and in the rain.

I have also raised issues about brown bins today. The brown ones are for garden waste, and like the blue ones last year, coverage across Bury seems patchy at best. We should be encouraging recycling by providing adequate facilities for everyone, not just some people.

Rick

I was delighted to see that the hole in Bury New Road near to Prestwich park Road South has finally been fixed. It was a burst water pipe of some kind, and it had been spewing water out at an alarming rate for a couple of weeks. It was also a big enough hole to be damaging cars.

I rang United Utilities to get them to sort it out, only to be told that it was a “Category 3″ leak, and would be fixed “at some point within 10 working days.” Given that it was in the middle of the busiest road in north Manchester, and was leaking water at what looked like thousands of litres a day, I wonder what kind of leak would engender a less meandering response? Niagara Falls appearing in St Mary’s Park, perhaps?

I was pretty annoyed at being given the brush-off in such an off-hand way. Even though I badgered them and it was finally fixed, United Utilities make good money from our water bills, and should provide a service which fixes major problems quickly. Water preservation is important, and I expect better from a big company than to turn up when it wants to fix a problem for its customers.

Rick