Council tearing up pavements – and your money!
Take a look at the exciting photos accompanying this article. One shows Charlotte Square’s 18th century pavement complete with steps to mount horses! Another is in Queensferry. Not bad either, although these paving slabs are only 40 years old.
Finally the other picture shows 2022 paving costing £500,000, laid down by Edinburgh City Council to replace slabs shown in the other picture in Queensferry because it looks nicer, they say.
Next week the council starts tearing up Queensferry High Street to repair the potholes caused by cruise passenger coaches. In the process, they’ll also be tearing up 3.5 million pound notes of your money.
Long-suffering residents pointed out that the pavements did not need replacing, and officials promised to “look into it”. That was in February. Oh, and June too. This month they repeated assurances that they are “engaging with stakeholders” over alternative surfacing proposals, but despite my request for an update, the councillor pushing hardest for the works, Kevin Lang, and his officials have failed to reply.
I also asked the council if it would co-ordinate road layout changes with measures to tackle the chronic problem of antisocial gangs of drivers and bikers who terrorise residents nightly (last night an illegally modified motorcycle tore through the town twice at 3.44am and 4am. I know the time because I was woken up).
Again, no reply. Perhaps officials felt there was no point in trying to tackle antisocial driving after Cllr. Lang’s extraordinary torpedoing of his party colleague Lewis Younie’s petition to close the Hawes Pier car park.
The council seem to be utterly determined to steamroller their exorbitantly costly ideas for localities across the city without properly listening to locals. Instead politicians use public meetings as party rallies to feature on their glossy newsletters ahead of May’s Holyrood poll.
Let’s have some real local democracy instead. A good place to find it is with YourParty.org, which last week dealt with a small hissy fit by its MPs with the simple message: grassroots members decide – not them.