As I write this, the tragic news of the death of Jo Cox MP is the major news item. Like all of us I was shocked and horrified at this violent political assassination, but I was surprised at the strength of own my personal reaction. As a Parish Councillor I may only be at the lowest level of the political structure, but even I have been physically assaulted, just because I was a Parish Councillor standing up for my integrity. This incident from the past clearly resonated and upset me far more than I expected. I mention this since it continues an ongoing theme of reminding everyone that Parish Councillors are all volunteers who get no financial benefit for the work they do. Why do we volunteer to be Parish Councillors? Mostly I think we want to make the community work better. We all have different ideas about what this means, but we generally agree about most things and work with integrity for everyone in the parish. For this voluntary work for the community by ordinary people we should be treated with respected.
The workload of the Parish Council has increased so I am making more use of committees to do the work and bring completed plans to the Parish Council meetings. This way we can hopefully keep the council meetings down to less than the recommended maximum time of two hours.
The slow process of transferring the management of Millennium House to PCA still continues and we now have clarification of the exact process so there is light at the end of the tunnel.
The Neighbourhood Development Plan is progressing. The Working Group met with the residents of St Ive to hear opinions about the development of the Butchers Arms supported by retail units and industrial units in the field opposite.
Don’t forget the parish
website st-ive-parishcouncil.gov.uk with council meeting agendas and
minutes; also downloadable copies of the Parish Pump. For those of you
who do Facebook, our St Ive Parish Council page is still being updated
with parish news. Phone me, email me on martin.corney@btinternet.com or
"martin corney blog st ive" in search engines will find my blogs for you
to comment on this article and other gems.
