Parking, flytipping, traffic and so on

As mentioned just a few days ago, with the exception of the Full CBC Council meeting to approve the budget coming up on Thursday and the regular cabinet meetings and Executive meetings the Assistant Portfolio workload is easing for the next month or so and I can now really get my teeth in to the ward issues which when not being affected by snow, tends to focus on fly tipping, parking and general traffic nuisance.

This month is no exception.

Currently I am dealing with fly tipping problems around the Richmond Road area, some nuisance behaviour and vandalism around the Highfield Road area, requests for traffic control on Stanbridge Road and parking assistance on Billington Road in advance of the so called “civilisation” plans for Billington Road in time when the new housing leading up to the A505 is built.

I have invited Cllr David McVicar to a ward meeting to hear some of these concerns and constructive ideas that residents have put to me. If he is able to make it and we can arrange something I will be sending out invites to watch this space.

If you live in one of the areas mentioned and either do believe there is a problem or alternatively don’t see a problem, please contact me so as many views as possible can be taken in to account.

Grant payment conditions almost done

Well the last week without email has been in a way quite peaceful (I tend to only get 20 or so emails a day) but also has caused a bit of a hold up with the report from my Working Party on Grants that the authority may or may not make to typically non profit organisations in the Unitary area. This is not to be confused with Third Sector payments including Contracts and Service Level Agreements which will not make sense to most people but includes payments to such organisations in return for measurable outcomes - we will come back to this later!

Now that we are back with all of our limbs connected our report will make it to the executive just a little later than planned for implementation in April.

I just have to wait now, probably until after the Genera Election to be given my next task which of course gives me more time to work on local ward issues again.

Central Bedfordshire website and email is down

Last night around 10pm a massive hardware fault took down the Central Bedfordshire website, email and phone lines.

Early this morning the phones lines were switched over to a back up system and limited usage was restored. However despite receiving the new hardware and having engineers on site the system is still down and is unlikely to be back on until tomorrow.

2 separate pieces of hardware seem to have gone wrong at the same time which therefore meant the normal procedures in place to allow the service to continue on to a backup system did not work.

Hopefully it will be back to normal tomorrow.