A pioneering scheme to give young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETs) opportunities to get back on track launched in the East Midlands region has been welcomed.
Chesterfield Borough Council's projected increase in car parking income for this year, residents will be interested to know, is £136,000! Many local residents have asked "Where will this money come from?" The fact is of course, that it will come from the big increases in parking charges levied on local residents by the incumbent Labour Chesterfield Borough Council this year. The previous Liberal Democrats administration charged a single daily rate of only £1.40 all day on Sundays, this has changed overnight to an hourly charge - a massive increase! Daily charges by the hour have increased; and the same daily charges have now been stretched to 8.00pm on some days for residents and all days for visitors to the town; not exactly encouraging for trade and tourism coming from beyond our boundaries. All this has come after Labour telling residents for many years that car parking charges in Chesterfield were much too high.
The new "gateway" signs which have recently appeared at all the gateways into the borough have clearly upset many residents and former residents from much further afield - even from as far away as Australia! These people are furious that the new signs don't feature the borough's universally popular crooked spire at all, whereas the signs they replaced showed it very prominently. Complainants also don't understand why 'Historic Market Town', the borough's other popular attraction, has been omitted from the new signs, whilst it was very prominent on the old ones. Cllr Ray Russell ( Liberal Democrat Council Group Leader ) said ' I very much share these concerns and that's why I spoke against the new signs and voted against their introduction at the Cabinet Meeting that sanctioned them. I just don't see why the old ones needed replacing as they showed our much-loved crooked spire prominently and highlighted our historic market town status. I was also very concerned that a lot of public money was being spent repla
The Coalition Government has stepped in to help kick-start the massive £300 million plus Waterside project along the A61 corridor in Chesterfield. The project, which will reclaim the long-derelict land running from the old Trebor site almost up to the new Tesco, has been stalled for the past eighteen months or so since the new canal basin was built. A £2.4 million grant for public realm work has been obtained from the government's "Growing Places" fund, via Sheffield City Region, and is to deliver all canal related infrastructure which forms the necessary structure of the Waterside site including provision for flood mitigation. This will include the construction of the new canal arm, locks, weir and road bridge access. Together with some "Get Britain Building" funding, these works will also enable the first phase of residential development, 45 homes, to take place on site which is expected to get the commercial development going around the canal basin..
Amid angry exchanges at the recent Chesterfield Council Cabinet meeting, the Labour Council announced that it was scrapping the popular Festival of Light. For the past 5 years this has taken place in Queen's Park as part of the increasingly popular Arts and Markets Festival, held over the October half-term.
In a tense exchange in the Chesterfield Council budget meeting on Thursday March 1st, Cllr Ray Russell, the Liberal Democrat Opposition Leader, unsuccessfully asked several times that the recent report on the changes to Parking Charge tariffs, brought forward only in private session last week, should be put before the Chesterfield Cabinet again - but this time in the public session.
