Public Meeting about the Mines

The regular monthly public meeting of the Combe Down Stone Mines Community Association about the Mines, was well attended last Thursday, with about 60-70 local people present in the Church.

As you can imagine high on the agenda was the closure of Combe Road. There is not much more to say about the problems, but there has been no further movement since work underground stopped and the road was closed.

There was discussion about the following points:

• whether all of the road needed to be closed from the King William to the Dentists?
• can vehicles be prevented from coming to the barriers where they turn and cause chaos going back into the Avenue?
• could residents be allowed to park their cars in the road by moving the barriers up the road to the old church?
• could some yellow lines in the village be removed to ease the parking problems?
• could The Firs could be made one way out of the village?
• could Parking wardens patrol more frequently?

I will talk to Highways Officers next week and raise these issues and suggestions with them. One of my neighbours asked how the recyclers and waste collectors would get to Combe Road so I have aked them to make arrangements to continue collections - the milkman seems to have got through all right!

Colin Harris from Scott Wilson Engineering doesn't yet know what can be done to solve the problems of subsidence. We hope that in the next week we will know more. However, it doesn't seem that the road will be opened in the immediate future.

An interesting fact came to light at the meeting - there are 748 houses in total to be stabilised and 60 have been done so far.

There was some discussion about security at the Work Site on Firs Field and I will be discussing this with our local beat manager, PC paul Honeychurch.