Preston Parish Council Meeting 09/01/13

PRESTON PARISH COUNCIL MEETING. 09/01/13

Written for the blog by a Preston resident

As normal we attended the monthly meeting of Preston Parish Council yesterday evening, the experience was a little surreal, almost none of the usual antics of spouse participation, clerk over involvement or sloppy procedure, really quite refreshing!

It was generally a well run meeting with only two minor incidents of note. The first is that there was a general discussion of a non agenda item, I believe to do with parking within the village. There is nothing amiss or out of order with that but the Chairman (there is no personal criticism here) then called for clarification (not a vote) and it was apparently ‘agreed’ the council had no difficulties with the suggested outcome, is that finalising it?, should it have been put on a future agenda? I’m not sure, I’m not a Parish Clerk.

The second item of note was that there wasn’t the usual talking about private matters between councillors during the meeting, at least not to the normal extent. However there was an occasion when the previous Chair had his contribution disrupted by idle chatter within council, to the extent that he got a little frustrated and declared “am I talking to myself’ and had to hold his contribution until order was restored.

There was even a suspension of animosity between certain councillors, who were calling each other by their Christian names, I was amazed!

At the start of the meeting there were four members of the public present with two advisors. Two members of the public attended to solicit clarification from the council in regard to a prospective Planning Application, on receiving a response from the council they promptly left the meeting.

That just left a ward councillor and 4 other people.

There was nothing awe inspiring, no great leaps forward and nothing controversial. It was an uneventful, run of the mill council meeting with nothing outstanding to comment on, just the usual items that are always there.

Why such a transformation, have the factions now fused, have they been ‘advised’, something has had an effect but Its only one meeting lets not rush into making comments at this stage.

There is one other thing, Notices are now being posted in time, at least for this short period since being made aware of it so hopefully that will now become standard practice.

In my humble opinion, all things considered it was a good meeting.