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Potholes

January 30th, 2008 · Posted by Skuds in Politics · 2 Comments · Politics

I was just flicking through last week’s Crawley News before sending it to the recycling bin, and stopped to read a story about potholes in the town.

Anyone driving through Crawley will be aware that the state of the roads is now worse than ever.  Some of the roads through Ifield have damage which causes more of a jolt than traffic calming measures do.  Sometimes you think that the if they are not going to fix them, county council ought to at least go out and mark the potholes with white paint so they can be more easily avoided. We have had some bad weather, but this is not a recent problem where all the blame can go on last year’s rain.

All that is old news though.  What amused me slightly was the forced outrage from some borough councillors that this should even be mentioned in their meetings as it is all down to the county council.  Duncan Crow, the deputy leader of the council, said:

I find it somewhat bizarre that we set up a committee to examine a service that West Sussex provides. It seems to be a dig at the county council.

Quite right! They are not doing much digging themselves on our roads…

If memory serves me right, the borough council has also discussed or set up committees about the hospital shuttle bus,  other hospital-related matters, the proposed merger of Surrey & Sussex police forces, rail facilities, health service reconfigurations, post office closures, and all sorts of other topics which are not services provided by the borough council.  Should the council have not discussed any of these things?  Not by Duncan’s criteria.

If he can see no purpose in discussing services that greatly affect his constituents and that they care about but that are provided (or not provided in the case of highways maintenance) by other bodies other than to ‘have a dig’ at someone else why were the post offices, railways and the hospital discussed?  Just to spend council time and resources to have a dig at the government?   You can’t have it both ways.

Interestingly, the borough’s overview & scrutiny commission recommended to the council, in October last year a whole pile of things including:

“Work with WSCC to develop an improved procedure for identifying areas in need of maintenance and reporting street lighting problems” (that had a priority ‘A’).

All of the recommendations were prefaced with this:

Maximising the Council’s role and influence in the provision of transport and maintaining good relations with partners were considered when formulating these recommendations.

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • Anna M H

    i need a lot of information on potholes by this week if anyone can help thanks. email me at: aannagirl20021@aol.com
    thank you so much,
    Anna H 🙂

  • Anna M H

    i just need like answers for how they form, how you can prevent them, how you can make a mode. please email me on that address
    thanks again,
    Anna H