Page 5 - Phonebox Magazine February 2008

HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Dear Sir/Madam
Planning Meeting for Wind Farm at Civic Offices on Monday 17 December 2007
I attended the above planning meeting which was for a very important issue and I was highly disturbed at the way this meeting was conducted. There was no real debate. No considered alternative view was put forward and the whole meeting felt biased.
The information provided to councillors had not been fully absorbed. One councillor had only received the papers at 4pm that afternoon and said they had not had time to read them properly.
Bearing in mind the stunning beauty of the location proposed, this was a highly irresponsible meeting. It is very disturbing to think that decisions of this nature are taken so lightly.
Yours faithfully
Mrs Prudence Radmore, Olney
Dear Sir
Sunday morning, a pleasant stroll into town taking in Johnson’s field, littered with beer cans and strewn with broken glass spreading onto the redway beneath the drinking control zone sign. What a joke!
A disgruntled Olney resident
The Petsoe Wind Farm
As your readers will now know, it was agreed by a tiny majority in the recent Council Meeting not to refer back the contentious Development Control Committee decision to allow a Wind Farm at Petsoe. This was carried (despite noble efforts by Councillors Debbie Brock, Steve Clark and Sam Potts) because the urban Labour Group – aided by some misled urban LibDem Members – block voted against Debbie’s motion on the pitiable excuse that: “It would lower the public standing of the Planning Committee to re-think the issue.” (The true reason is that the wind farm proposal has been a Labour Party aim for the past two years, to try and bolster up their declining support in urban MK. It simply doesn’t matter to them and their LibDem/Green supporters that a huge plant is going to be put in the Borough’s only area of tranquility – there are very few Labour or Green votes in the district around Olney.)
I went with Debbie and two other Emberton residents to check the letters of support trumpeted by Your Energy – another job not done by MK officers, whose whole performance over the application has been truly appalling. We found some 50 letters of support from within a five-mile radius of Olney Church; many of these containing the stereotyped statement (common to most of the 1,500 emails and letters received from all over the British Isles and Europe) that: “A Petsoe wind farm would provide electricity for 9,000 homes in the area.” So it would – if the winds blew at all regularly, but these don’t. the Burton Latimer plant has now been running for a whole year, and has produced heavily-subsidised power for just 18% of the time, blowing the Your Energy argument right out of the water.
As someone who has tried very hard throughout my local career to unite the urban and rural parts of our borough, the obvious split in the Council is a painful one to bear. As for Your Energy, its last-published accounts show a huge trading deficit, so its effort to get this unsightly and useless scheme passed is not really surprising.
Yours faithfully
Edward Ellis, Hon Alderman MKC, Emberton
Dear Sir
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Phonebox Magazine 5