For a bi-monthly meeting the Broadfield Forum seems to come along again very quickly.

The attendance seems to be falling again, on both sides of the fence. There were only 9 regular members of the public there, Toby from the council’s community services department in the chair, a couple of coppers, a girl from the Guinness Trust and one of our 5 councillors. Its just as well we didn’t have any front-line council staff this time or there would have been a danger of officialdom outnumbering the public.

There were the usual grumbles about mini-motos, public drinking at the Barton, street lights, and the K2 road crossing. All important stuff, but you just have a dread feeling that these problems will never get solved and will be around for ever.

Some interesting feedback on a couple of the issues though. Best of all was a letter from the Highways Agency about the lights at K2. It was all about the phasing/timing of the lights and was exactly the sort of thing which regularly crops up in competitions for worst use of English. I just wish I had a copy of it to quote from – must see if I can lay my hands on it. I am sure the writer was well-intentioned and thought he was being helpful but it was a typical example of an expert in his field using the language and jargon of his profession to non-communicate with a layman and hilarious for its unintentional (I hope) obscurity.

There was a bit more luck with the derelict and toppled telecoms cabinet next to the Broadfield Park entrance – BT have said they will go and sort it out even if it turns out not to be theirs and send a bill to whoever it belongs to if it is not them.

New topics introduced this time round were:

• Speeding traffic on Pease Pottage Hill, Tollgate Hill and Woodmans Hill (notice the common factor?)
• Safety on Creasys Drive, following the couple of recent accidents there and historical fatalities
• How the Greenway is now overgrown and impassable as it goes from Tollgate Hill to Broadfield Park (I raised that one – I walked that way to the count last week and was quite shocked to see the disrepair it has fallen into in the last year.)
• The quality of grass-cutting in Broafield and how much worse it is this year than in previous years.
• How all the street signs in Broadfield are so caked in dirt you can’t read them (this is one of Jayne’s hobby horses)

What was depressing for me personally was hearing about two problems I spent ages trying to solve when I was a councillor up to June 2004 and which are not only still there, but are now worse than ever. One is an area supposedly for emergency vehicle access to the Courts area. Some residents kept breaking the locks on the gate so they could park there, meaning that ambulances or fire engines can’t get in. The situation now is that the gate has gone completely and the council have even marked out a disabled parking spot in there! The sister-in-law is more than a little concerned now that her 6-year-old has discovered a fascination with matches…

The other problem was with street lighting in the Courts. Some sort of design flaw left gaps in the lighting so certain corners are unlit. The SIL lives in one of these dark corners and after many calls to both councils was told by one of them that she should buy her own lamppost for outside her (council) house. Glad to see that customer service is alive and well.

The Woodmans Hill traffic issue is a disappointment too. When the new houses were built on the old council depot site there was a planning condition that they had to introduce traffic calming measures on Woodmans Hill as part of a Section 106 agreement before the houses could be fully occupied. They all look to be fully occupied but the S106 has been ignored and not enforced. I don’t know if it is too late to get it done now, but someone is looking into it. Back when the site was still at the development brief stage I was dead chuffed to get traffic calming included as a pre-condition of development so I am more than a little pissed off to see it not followed through.

The Broadfield Forum could be good place to bring together all the interested parties and get things improved, but when only about 1 in a thousand residents actually turn up it feels like an uphill struggle. I had only just got the facilitator to appreciate that a bit more publicity, with a more attention-grabbing topic for the meeting would attract new faces and then he moved on and we are starting all over with a new bloke… he seems to be quite good though and its early days for him still, but the publicity seems to have reverted to letters to previous attendees only, which isn’t going to increase numbers much.