We'll all take the pain!

FRANK SOBEY: We'll all take the pain of meters .Thursday, September 29, 2011 Herald Express
ON THE evening of Thursday, September 29, I plan to be at the Oldway public meeting when our councillors debate the placing of yet more parking meters around the town centres and shoreline.

I write this having just watched the hugely expensive Torbay Council-sponsored TV advert promoting late season holidays on the English Riviera, so let me start there.

Whether you like it or not we live on the coast and by its very nature is therefore a 'honey pot' for tourists.

What we have not had for the past four or five years is a sunny summer.

Most places can seem somewhat sad in the rain but a beach is particularly pathetic.

While the harbingers of doom bang on about how hopeless it all is, you must agree that we do live in a stunning beautiful area that springs into life when the sun beats down.

Sky Atlantic is still screening the television diary Fish Town, which tracks the lives of Brixham folk around the harbour.

Sad that it is only on the expensive pay-to-view Sky Atlantic because the filming is stunning and the narrator spins the yarn in elementary verse.

The sun seems always to shine and I do believe that even the seagulls are flying upside down!

It's this, I believe, that has prompted our mayor Gordon Oliver to stump up an additional £250,000 to promote tourism. Hence the little film.

The screening now, it seems, is to capture the late season business although I was a little curious about the waterslide shot because it is, of course, closed at this time of year.

Having said that, it is really good to see lovely film clips of the English Riviera on TV as a thirty-second advertisement.

The film is buoyant and that is how we must be if we want to retain our tourist business in these troubled times.

Part of that buoyancy is down to the local population and whether we make the visitors really welcome.

Having local folk walk around with faces like slapped kippers doesn't get the best reaction from people who have travelled many miles to holiday on the friendly English Riviera.

Now about that welcome.

The reason that I will pitch up at the parking meter meeting is because it seems to me that we are spending hundreds of thousands getting people to visit and then metaphorically take the foot shot as we make them angry by blatantly stinging them with painful parking meter charges.

But, of course, it isn't just the holidaymakers who take the parking meter pain since the local population get to share.

A local legal-eagle is looking at the relevant statute since our executive seem to be using parking meters as a means of revenue collection rather than traffic control.

That being the case, we have one part of the administration saying to people please come visit whilst another department is making them very unwelcome!

Of course, it isn't just about tourists when the parking meters start to spread like some alien life form.

It's hard enough these days to hold a community together around the centre of a town.

The evidence is the sad empty shops that look hopelessly like the mouth of a man in need of a dentist after years of oral neglect.

We've spent, again, hundreds of thousands on town centre managers and consultants.

We watched our Prime Minister ' launch' shopping guru Mary Portas on some sort of spiritual retail journey around the towns and cities in the hope of regenerating the flagging fortunes of the high street.

So what do we do on the English Riviera / Torbay/ Agatha's Riviera?

Parking Meters! Outstanding! You couldn't make it up.

One of the planned pitches is on the road around the west side of Paignton harbour.

The harbour economy is fragile and for the local businesses parking meters will be both catastrophic and pointless.

Catastrophic because for many a business it will be the final nail in a cheap coffin.

Pointless because people will simply not park there and so the machines will stand idle as a monument to the commercial corpse.

So, let us celebrate what is good, push forward socially cohesive and economically viable initiatives, but most of all have a council with its eye on the ball.

DON'T SIT THERE - GET UP AND GO!

I was the guest speaker this morning at the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy based at South Devon College.

“The Peter Jones Enterprise Academy is an opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs to realise and achieve their business dreams.
Set-up by Peter Jones, CBE, star of ‘Dragons’ Den’, the Academy was the first to offer further education courses in enterprise and entrepreneurship in the UK where students are actually required to set up and run their own business.”

My thing, obviously, was about the life of Harbour Sports from the idea, the creation, the life pattern up to and including today.

The today is the interesting part as the national economy balances on a knife edge. Today Nick Clegg will address the Liberal Party at their annual conference and bang on about the economy. Meanwhile TV star and shopping expert Mary Portas is galloping around the country attempting to stimulate life into lifeless high streets.

These are hard times and the increasing trend if for people to hide indoors and sink into the virtual world offered by the Internet and countless television channels.

Certainly we have noticed reduced footfall and a reluctance take hands out of pockets!
But taking hands out of pockets is what needs to happen for all sorts of reasons. Unless the economy lifts then we will head for curious places.

Now, whilst I was banging on about Harbour Sports I suddenly slipped into a sunnier place where people got out and did rather than sat down and watched. Windsurfers, surfers, kayakers, sailors, hikers, climbers and in point of fact people that got out and did.

You see, if the body and spirit is active then the mind will follow. SO GET OUT AND DO – LIVE THE LIFE – MAKE IT HAPPEN.

frank

Are we really all in it together?

This is a cut and paste from my fortnightly column in the Herald Express today...

WE KEEP being told about the Big Society and my question remains the same: What Big Society?

David Cameron and his band of Eton College Old Boys keep banging on about how we must all pull together and how we are all in this together and yet, to me, the evidence is stacking up against that battle hymn.

We are told they have been handed the empty coffers and devastating debt by the previous administration.

But what must be clear to anyone with half a brain cell that poor old Gordon Brown was just the silly sausage who got left with the useless parcel when the music stopped in the international game of financial pass the parcel.

When he opened his cleverly-wrapped parcel he found it full of junk bonds, worthless mortgages and other dubious financial goodies. Had David Cameron been in that seat at the time, he too would have been clutching that nasty little goodie bag. But he wasn't.

Some bright spark suggested that never in the history of man has so much been taken from so many by so few.

It is worth looking at where our elite group of political leaders came from and where the money came from which supported and still supports them. So when George Osborne famously said what he wants is what we want, and that he wants for his children what we want for ours — we're all in this together — I wanted to cry.

So what do you think of the Big Society in Torbay? Remember that we are all in this together, are we not?

Tell the man who has just lost his job that we are all in this together. Tell the parent struggling to buy food as prices increase and fuel prices escalate that we are all in this together.

Tell the young people who left school last summer and still can't find work that we are all in this together.

Tell the young graduate with a good degree and now a Masters, yet can't find a job, that we are all in this together.

Tell the Torbay citizen looking at high council wages for senior staff, the bonuses still being paid to bailed-out bankers and the manipulation of curious business deals locally that we are all in this together.

Being a sad soul I sat, the other night, through a meeting of our local transport committee which had been opened to the public.

The purpose of the meeting was to look at the ludicrous proposal to stick even more traffic meters in popular areas.

Has no one told these people that you have to plant before you harvest?

Stripping yet more money from the people will accelerate decline. What worried me a little was the rabbit-like look in the eyes of a number of councillors.

Gordon Oliver wandered in during the meeting and sat quietly in the councillor corner. At the end of the meeting he was ambushed and asked suddenly to comment.

Gordon spoke for about 15 minutes, wandering loosely through the fact the country was short of cash, that Torbay was something or other (I couldn't understand that bit) and that hard times were ahead; which perhaps accounted for the rabbit-like look in the eyes of his fellow councillors, although not in the eyes of the council officers.

Therefore Mr Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Cable, are we really, really, in this together, and is the Big Society not quite what we think it is as funding is yet again cut from another charity?

I was asked the other day how I would get the economy running again, and my response was to tell them to go and buy an ice cream.

You see, in order to buy an ice cream a commercial exchange has to take place.

The ice cream seller now has income and the ability to buy more stock.

People see you eating the ice cream and do the same. Suddenly the ice cream seller is busy and has to employ people to help him.

He buys more stock from the local producer who in turn can buy a new machine from the factory that was about to make people redundant.

Now that is what I call a Big Society!

They say that pride comes before a fall.....

So let me tell you about something that could have been nasty but turned out to be very funny and somewhat humbling. I'm getting older by the day and because my mind, according to my daughter, is saying one thing and my body another things don't always turn out the way they should. Jess noticed the problem watching me run upstairs. I have always found it almost impossible to walk up stairs and always want to take them three at a time. My mind accepts that but these days my body simply can't facilitate! The mind says three whilst the body says two and down I go in an undignified heap.

In attempt to keep breathing I walk/jog the dog through the woods when I can. I say when I can because the kids also want to do the same and of course I stand back, usually with gratitude and let them do the business.

Anyway on this slightly damp afternoon I jogged around the local woods that too few people share these days. Now if it is damp I tend to put on my ancient mountain boots for added traction. But this day I didn't bother because the effort was simply too much.

So I'm coming down this steep bank and lose my footing. I don't fall but do crash out onto the path in front of a young maid walking a large brown Labrador. Nice dog and attractive maid offering the ideal macho moment. Having regained my balance I brush the leaves and twigs from my hair and smile confidently. She asks whether I am OK; obviously concerned for this curious geriatric semi-jogger. Of course, in a very masculine way, I confirm my fitness to jog on.

I don't get very far before slipping on the wet mud and diving headlong into a dirty ditch next to the path. For a little while I remain still amongst the roots, brambles and smelly water waiting for the pain to come. My embarrassed dog has wandered off, obviously not wanting to be associated with the ageing idiot in the ditch. The Labrador lady arrives and expresses immediate concern for my well being.

I gingerly lift myself damply from the ditch and all seems well other than a few scratches, some minor bleeding and throbbing shoulder.

But all isn't well and I ask her, somewhat pathetically, to help me search for the missing pieces of my over inflated ego in the hope of regaining something of my lost dignity........she laughs and wanders on whilst I gather my hound and limp pathetically home......

I think that I could still hear her laughing when I eventually staggered out of Occombe Woods...

I will leave you with that image!

PARKING METER MADNESS

This is posted at thisissouthdevon.co.uk today......

I've just staggered back from a meeting of Torbay Council Transport Committee meeting which had been opened to the public. The gathering was at the English Riviera Centre and there was a certain irony about having to pay £3 at a meter to speak at a parking control meeting!

Torbay Council is constantly banging on about town centre regeneration, numerous empty shops and of course the infamous BID scheme where local traders pay a supplementary tax for town centre improvement. So what are they doing to support that? Well more parking meters with draconian charges of course which will simply drive people away from the towns!

Of course it isn't just the meters it is also about the hurtful charging policy. For a while now I have been promoting a call for FIRST HOUR FREE parking where meters have already been erected. The call has been made that it is only 20p for the first ten minutes. Well if you can get from the parking meter with your 20p ticket back to your car, then lock it before sprinting to your destination, grabbing what you want and then legging it back to the car inside ten minutes then you stand a good chance of being selected for the Olympic sprint team!

If Torbay really want to make extra cash from parking then a few parking meters dotted around the Willows might be worth thinking about. But to carry on with a parking policy that hammers town centre parking is eventually kill off the place.

My specific beef is with the proposal to pepper Roundham Road around the harbour with parking meters. I've watched Torbay Council make a pigs ear of Paignton Harbour by turning a once popular holiday destination into a myriad of prohibition notices, pointless fencing with all the attraction of the exercise yard at Guantanamo Bay and enough coloured road markings to equal a major motorway traffic intersection. Parking meters will finally finish the place off.

These knee jerk reactions to strategy really really worry me and they should worry you too.

We don't have the right to insult.....

This is from my occasional correspondent slot in the weekly Herald Express newspaper...

Thursday, September 01, 2011 Herald Express

IT'S VERY easy to take a spiteful pop at local councillors and, of course, any elected mayor. Nick Bye can tell you that and, whether you agreed with him or did not, the public rhetoric too often was both hurtful and, indeed, viciously spiteful.

Gordon Oliver is now in the firing line and getting many of the same hurtful, spiteful attacks.

​ATTACKED: Nick Bye, left, and current mayor Gordon Oliver have been in the firing line for hurtful, spiteful attacks
.You see, we all have the right to comment but we don't have the right to be rudely insulting, especially when the nastiness is hidden behind some silly pseudonym.

The other evening I was allowed, with two friends, the privilege of speaking for five minutes at a council committee meeting.

It was to push for a change in the proposed 100 per cent increase in school transport cost to parents and guardians.

That sort of increase was draconian, way ahead of any ruthless utility company price hikes and hitting many families already struggling to keep their heads above water.

I quite like public speaking — how sad is that? — but my two friends do not and it took courage to face our elected members in the ballroom at Oldway Mansion.

They did so very well and I felt that our councillors understood their bravery in speaking publicly about something they felt strongly about.

Looking around the ballroom while they were speaking and thinking about how intimidating it all seemed, I wondered again about public gatherings in venues for local folk that might prove a little more user friendly.

Nick Bye used to encourage folk to have a say before council cabinet meetings and other councillor events, which was fine for those happy enough to stand and speak.

Nick also had his monthly caravan engagement sessions at assorted places in Torbay.

But I think these things need to be a little wider in application, hence the suggestion that we use the Riviera Centre for monthly mayor meetings.

The format could be inclusive and user friendly. Gordon?

Here is another little point that is worth considering.

Often a mayor or councillor has to punt an idea that has been promoted by council officers rather than politicians.

Poor old Nick certainly took many custard pies when others were able to duck out of sight.

Let me give you an example. The chain and concrete barrier around Paignton Green is seen by many as the fault of councillors but the suggestion and energy came from an officer of the council rather than a councillor.

These things too often get lost in the rhetoric and drift into history. But hey, you doubtless know all this.

Talking about Paignton Green, I happened to be wandering in the sun at the start of this week and came across something I have not seen for a while.

The green was packed from end to end with folk sunbathing, families picnicking, children playing and people just generally having a good time.

Sunshine makes all the difference and, after five bad summers in a row, our tourism figures dip.

Despite the hard work of our new English Riviera Tourism Company, bad weather just doesn't bring a smile to the face of an aspirant tourist.

Not helped either if large sectors of the local community seem intent in walking around with a face like a slapped kipper.

As I write, the sun is out and so the prospect of a swim in the sea beckons.

Come and try it – the water's fine!