31 October - Old problems ignored
If every document relating to Bexley Council is filed away for 20 plus years,
sooner or later one runs out of space. I spent much of yesterday recycling as
much old junk as I could and in the process found quite a lot of Council letters
dated 1999 to 2001 with references to letters dated 1992 - most of which have not yet been found.
It would seem that senior Bexley executives were just as arrogant and
dictatorial back then as they are now, the difference being that that
if you wrote to the Chief Executive 20 years ago there was a good chance that it
would be his signature on the reply. Not that they actually answered any of the questions.
In 2001 Chief Executive Christopher Duffield told me that he was disappointed that I believed him to be supremely arrogant so I
told him why and referred him to the evidence.
The
document tidying revealed that my complaints about inconsiderate parking and the
danger created at the junction with Carrill Way go back 30 years. (See this weekend’s photos.)
In 1992 I asked for yellow lines to be considered and the
Group Engineer (Traffic and Road Safety) turned down my request on the grounds
that “yellow lines cause considerable inconvenience to most residents”.
By 1999 his opinion had gone though a 180° reversal and a Controlled Parking
Zone was proposed. The correspondence reveals that end on parking was a problem
then just as it is now and the area designated for use as as a "turning head"
only should be subject to the CPZ. My request that parking bays be marked out in
a conventional manner was ignored.
In the event the proposed CPZ boundary stopped well short of my road and everything suggested went unheeded
for 20 more years. They called themselves The Listening Council.
