Kismet

Friday 26th February.

I haven't seen my family much for the latter part of this month - Borough meetings tend to be in the evenings, along with the meetings convened by the parishes and while most County meetings are arranged during the working day, the Local Area Committee meetings are always held in the evening. Consequently the evening diary has been full during the last two weeks of February and among the list, I've attended the aforementioned LAC, a Windlesham Parish Planning Meeting and Finance & General Purposes Meeting, a borough Conservative Group meeting and Full Borough Council Meeting! I also dropped into one of the West End Parish Meetings for a long overdue catch up with the .boys at West End.

Among the considerable number of agenda items discussed and decided during these meetings, a couple of matters are particularly worthy of diary note and by chance they both occur on teh same date: March 10th.

First is the review of the way that the County kept the county roads open - or not - during the recent snow. The committee will be chaired by David Ivision and Lavinia Sealy and will call a number of officers, contractors and agencies to account for their performance. It is envisgaed that the conclusions will be taken forward into an action plan in order to ensure any failings experienced will not be repeated. The Borough will also be having a 'wash up' pending the conclusions.
Personally, I'm pushing for a more local and immediate response to such events. As far as I'm concerned, we should be able to have a system where on the ground circumstances take priority over contractual arrangements - there's little point gritting Weybridge if theres no snow there for example; and have a cross-authority approach to dealing with situations as the circumstances deteriorate, so that unused Council employees can be utilised to deal with matters such as a marooned estate for example.
But perhaps I'm pre-judging the review.

That same evening, Surrey Heath Borough Council is due to meet to hear and debate the matter of a planning application for the proposed demolition of a locally-listed school and its replacement with a building that will be a mosque.
A mosque exists within the fabric of the school already and the mosque committee have applied to have the building replaced with a buidling complete with 'onion style' roof and minarets. Ordinarily such a matter would be dealt with by the planning committee, but after a proceedural complication, the matter is being brought to full council for debate and owing to the public interest the meeting is to be held at the Camberley Theatre (or Civic Hall as it will forever be known to me. A little like the way in which my father still calls Ford Mondeos 'Cortinas'...).

So, one way or another, March 10th should be an interesting day.