Surgery last Saturday

I think the prospects of a warm bank holiday must have encouraged residents to visit us at St Johns on Saturday morning. We were fully occupied with neighbours concerns, not just about the election results either. Primarily parking issues at the Mudeford Lane school drop off point are creating safety issues despite the double yellows recently installed. Buses are being delayed and it is suggested that children are being put at risk for the sake of a 50 metre walk. We were hoping that the yellows would encourage drivers to stop parking on the pavements causing distress to neighbours and pedestrians, but apparently this is not the case. So back to the drawing board on this one with references made to our newly elected County Councillor for Mudeford as County now deal with all street parking in Christchurch. Waste collection issues have dwindled to a point where we can almost accept that the system is working in accordance with expectations, certainly levels of recycling are up in the 60% region, landfill is way down so all in all quite a success, however there are still some residents, very few, who are struggling to come to terms with the system and we have two such incidents in our patch. Thankfully they both appear to be responding to our intervention so I expect these to diminish over the next couple of weeks. Our thanks however to those concerned residents who are letting us know where the problems are. A representative of a pensioner group asked if we could arrange some talks to their group about what the Council are doing in these austere times especially as they appreciated what we had achieved by sticking to our guns over the Christchurch Hospital development. Nice to get some thanks about our involvement in that matter. Finally we always appreciate the discussions with our business sector and took note of the concerns in respect of the tidiness of our street scene and the dealing of the perennial weed problem along our pavements.