Council Meeting 27th November

At our meeting on 27th November the following decisions were made. It was agreed to increase the number of cuts that take place along the Rights of Way footpaths leading from Home Meadow across Park Road to Church Lane. Under our devolved services contract with Bucks County Council we maintain all the ROW footpaths in the parish and find that 3 cuts a year is usually enough. However these particular footpaths are the main walking route to school for many young children in our parish and residents had complained of overgrowing vegetation making the walk difficult at the start and end of the growing season. We hope this measure will ensure the walk is easier going forward.

Our new Councillor Bill Baker has volunteered to champion the redesign of Kingsway Green – if you are interested in volunteering to be on the new steering group for this please let the Clerk know.

We now have a final draft of the Parish Plan which has been approved and will be printed and presented to our residents in due course. We are aiming for a launch at our Annual Parish Meeting on 5th March next year. We have had this in the pipeline for years with many layers of consultation and promotion of its development through the Farnhams Magazine, our noticeboards and website, a local poster campaign in the shops and many references to it through the community facebook page. The questionnaire was hand delivered to every household in the parish in the summer of 2016. We are thrilled we will shortly be able to present the final document to our residents.

We are still working on agreeing our precept ( our portion of the Council tax) for 2018/19. We have a Council which is ambitious to make a real difference to the lives of our residents and pursue the policies identified in the Parish Plan. Many projects are vying for funding – such as revamping the play area in Farnham Common  – and we are keen to ensure we have a strategy to provide the funding to deliver the projects with the greatest priorities. This may mean an increase in our precept for next year.

Finally it has been agreed that the council should seek to hold a public meeting for residents to discuss with a local developer their long term plans to develop land south of Elm Close in Farnham Common. This is Green Belt land currently but SBDC will be re-conducting its review for the Local Plan in the near future and so its future status is not guaranteed. The Council has taken no position on this yet other than that there should be no inappropriate development in the Green Belt – development would be inappropriate if it harmed its function. The purpose of any public meeting would be for information to be made available if possible and to see to what extent the Council may be able to steer any future development if necessary. We are in the process of trying to contact the developer to set up a meeting and will let residents know through as many channels as we can when and if such a meeting can be agreed.