Parish Plan update

As reported in October last year a public meeting was held at the Festival Hall where local residents could view and discuss the draft Parish Plan.

It was announced at this meeting that the Alderley Edge Parish Plan was expected to be available prior to Christmas so having not heard anything since I caught up with Nicholas Ridings, Chairman of the Parish Plan Committee, this week.

Nicholas said “We massively under estimated the time it would take to move from a good draft, to the final version. It does not help that the Steering Group are almost all full time workers and Q1 2010 has been very full time for all of us.

“Considering the time spent by a significant number of people on the Parish Plan, we feel the final document has to be of a certain quality which cannot be just thrown together.”

The committee are now nearing the end of the drafting stage so the main document will be finished in about 5 weeks. This will then be set out and printed so it is expected that the final document will be available to the public in June.

Having just opened my Council Tax bill I’ve noticed that the levy for the Parish Council has gone up by over 40%!

I’m not complaining, the point is that this year WE have £120,000 to spend. Given that there are now 1000 Alderleyedge.Commers (nearly 25% of the population) it would be interesting to know what people would like it to be spent on…..

We estimate the site reaches a lot more than 25% of the population. 1,000 is the approximate number of people that are members, many people use the site without registering. Last month we had 4,730 unique visitors (according to Google Analytics). Whilst not a typical month as the coverage of the murder attracted a lot of non Alderley Edge residents to the site, I would estimate that alderleyedge.com now reaches approximately 50% of local residents and that is factoring in that a proportion of our visitors are people that work and conduct business in the village and basing the population of Alderley on a figure of 5,000.

Although it is probably too late with regards to the Parish Plan, hopefully going forward we can help the community have more of a voice in how the village is run. Each day we get more people visit the site than turn up at the likes of the Parish Plan consultation meetings. It was interesting to note that of the 2,632 questionnaires completed for the Knutsford town plan 1,131 were submitted via the Internet - as far as I am aware there was no way to respond to the Alderley Edge parish plan via the Internet.

With regards to the significant increase to the levy for the Parish Council I believe Lisa is looking into it and hopes to have more information soon. At the moment we believe the increase is to cover the cost of the Parish council taking over the Festival Hall and unfortunately not additional money to spend.

Lisa has just published an article at http://bit.ly/c4DoHP covering the levy for the Parish Council.