Gornal News & Goings On

NEWS

Public Fury at Car Park Meeting There was uproar at the Special Meeting of the North Dudley Area Committee last night (Monday 7th), when it emerged that the issue everyone had turned up to discuss - the provision of a car park for Gornal - had been mysteriously left off the agenda. The meeting was arranged to give local residents and businesses the chance to air their views on a basket of related transport matters. For many months Dudley Council has been attempting to implement double yellow lines on many roads in the village, which will effectively kill off trade in the shopping area unless the long awaited car park is finally built. A number of other issues have inevitably come into play during previous debates on this subject - such as speed and volume of traffic and the potential for serious accidents near Robert Street and Redhall schools. Yampy arrived early for last night's meeting - held at Straits Primary School - only to find that some Gornal shopkeepers were already leaving, complaining that they had been told that they would not be permitted to raise the subject of a car park for Gornal. This did not seem credible to us; after all, Councillor Fraser Macnamara had promised to dust off his old plans for the project, had he not? Besides, the advertisement for the meeting placed in the Dudley News last week gave the reason for the meeting as "traffic issues in the Lower Gornal and Gornal Wood area", so how could any pertinent comment from the floor be ignored? However, once inside the hall it became clear from the published agenda that the only item that could be discussed was the Council's latest amendments to its proposed double yellow line plans. Accordingly the meeting began with Council Officer Graham Isherwood running through the latest proposal, street by street. When he had finished the Chairman, Cllr. Stanley, asked for comments. There followed wave after wave of protests from outraged members of the public, all stating that we were 'putting the cart before the horse' and should reject any traffic restriction proposal until the issue of the car park was resolved. Further petitions were then handed in to join the 3193 signatures already presented by Cllr. Millward. Cllr. Millward and Evans strongly agreed with the audience, and immediately moved that the Council's recommendation should be rejected. However, the Chairman felt that it would be 'stifling democratic debate' to end the meeting at this point, so he did not call for a vote on this motion until he had persisted for a further half an hour in trying to encourage contributions on the sole subject of the double yellow line proposal. Eventually Cllr. Millward's motion was passed unanimously and the Council's plans rejected. We have hardly scratched the surface of last night's shenanigans in this article, and we plan to return to the subject once we have established who made the decision to eliminate the Gornal car park from the agenda - and why.

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