Bristol Parks Forum, Release Date: 14th January 2008
Author: Fraser Bridgeford, Chairman, Bristol Parks Forum.
Bristol Parks Forum (BPF) today urged councillors to show their support for the Parks and Green Spaces Strategy as originally consulted. They called for Tuesday’s debate on the State of the City to include the proposed strategy.
Alison Bromilaw of the BPF said: “We are asking councillors to show their support for the the strategy under the financial terms on which it was consulted under and not the revised terms that were presented to cabinet during this debate.”
Further scrutiny over the last few days after BPF highlighting the proposed sell-off of Bristol parkland reveals that the value of land to be sold of could be over £200,000,000 rather than the £102,000,000 highlighted last week.
BPF’s Fraser Bridgeford continued: “Once we investigated the funding model further we discovered that not only the initial capital costs, but also the ongoing maintenance costs would be funded through the sale of Bristol’s vital green infrastructure. This will mean that the total value of land to be sold will be between £196,000,000 and £228,000,000. This just goes from bad to worse and calls into question the validity of the whole consultation process.”
Bristol Parks Forum’s quarterly meeting will be held at Windmill Hill City Farm at 9:30am this Saturday 19th January. All members are urged to attend this weekend to register their support for the Bristol Parks Forum position on the funding proposal.
For all media enquiries relating to this press release, please contact Bristol Parks Forum on 0791 901 5774.
The City Council just cannot be trusted with our open, green spaces:
http://vowlesthegreen.blogspot.com/search/label/green%20spaces
There you go again Vowlesthegreen – being kind to the council.
This bunch cant be trusted with anything.
No, this can’t be allowed to happen.
One of Bristol’s defining and redeeming features is the amount of green space in the city.
It makes the place liveable and is a vital, equitable resource.
With the sale and development of this huge amount of land will come extremely high housing densities, furthing destroying the quality of life for Bristolians.
How much of this new housing will be “affordable”? Sod all, because Bristol City Council have a lamentable record in enforcing the minimum statutory amount of “affordable” housing in the city. They’re just happy to bend over and be boned by their developer mates.
Urban open space is a communal asset that should not be auctioned off by our corrupt and incompetent councillors.
If allowed the councillors will sell any part of Bristol.
Their motivation must be seriously questioned and they must be stopped.
I am watching closely from Nottingham where a new parks strategy is being proposed and, I suspect, will end up following Bristol in proposing selling open space to create a parks development fund. I just had an article on parks published in the Nottingham Civic Newsletter (see my blog entry 16 Jan 2008). Have you come across the Green Space online forum — it might be a place to alert others.
‘There you go again Vowlesthegreen – being kind to the council.
This bunch cant be trusted with anything.’ said Bristol Patriot.
I take the point (!), though I’m also on record as also not trusting them on: transport; waste management; basic all-round competence and effectiveness; tree management; plain english use and open participation; air quality; spending on expensive consultants; noise pollution; producing masses of leaflets and newspapers that often just get dumped; libraries; swimming pools…and that’s just the ones that first spring to mind!
I’ll work on giving my language a sharper edge !
Please click here to sign my brand new e-petition opposing plans to flog hundreds of acres of green spaces to developers:
http://epetitions.bristol.gov.uk/petition.php?id=166
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