St. Helier is getting cleaner

I still have to pinch myself when I see our staff with their brushes and handcarts, or astride their green machines, and it's dark. For as long as I can remember you only ever saw one or two people cleaning the town streets in the afternoons, and it's long been an ambition of mine to have street cleansing crews working into the evenings, as happens in many other towns of this size.

Since July last year there has been a new trial in place whereby all of the Parish street cleansing staff are concentrated on the area within the Ring Road, while the TTS or States staff deal with the rest of the Parish. But St. Helier parishioners voted extra funding so we could increase our staffing to cover the afternoons, evenings and weekends, and what a difference it is making.

Not that we're home and dry, by any means - we still have to tackle the root of the problem and deter people from dropping litter in the first place; we need to improve the provision of litter bins, too - sometimes I pick up some litter and find I have to walk half a mile before I find a bin to put it in; we need to allocate more resources to the actual washing of pavements and precincts. But progress is definitely being made towards a cleaner St. Helier.

The St Thomas' RPZ

The latest addition to St Helier's Residents' Parking Zones or RPZs went live at the beginning of the year. As with the previous RPZs, Cheapside and St Mark's, there have been teething problems; for people on the waiting list to get a permit it is particularly frustrating not being able to use the areas which were previously disc parking, while some residents who already have off-street parking are concerned about whether there are enough spaces provided for visitors. At the meeting accompanying the launch of the new RPZ, held for obvious reasons in St Thomas church hall, a number of useful suggestions were made, especially about how the number of parking spaces available may be increased, and the team at the Town Hall is looking into the proposals. These include making it legal to park on some parts of the street that are currently yellow-lined and removing some of the 'ugly' concrete planters, some of which have pretty stunted trees in them.

Most of the feedback we have received has been positive: residents of streets previously clogged up in the evenings and weekends by high-sided commercial vehicles are delighted to get some light in their windows; the Parish Wardens, whose activities are funded by the permit fee, are adding to the sense of security in town streets; in St Helier, as elsewhere, residents' parking adds to the sense of living in a particular neighbourhood, spares residents the headache of having to move their vehicles all the time, and means that if you live in town and want to drive out to the beach or the countryside you have a pretty good chance of being able to park in the vicinity of your home when you come back.

Though I don't qualify for a RPZ permit, I still get a real buzz when I walk in town streets and see the permits in the windscreens of most vehicles. It's the kind of practical politics that got me into this in the first place, and it takes me back to the first meetings of the working group which were held in the language school I ran in Don Street. Martyn Gallery was there, Bernie Manning, Jenny Bridge and several others. The latest RPZ has taken 12 years to deliver, but that's still not quite as long as the Millennium Town Park or a parish-wide recycling scheme.

Car alarms

A minor nuisance, no doubt, but am I the only person who objects to the fact that during wind and rain hypersensitive car alarms go on in the middle of the night? After all, what is the justification for having your car alarm enabled in Jersey anyway? What evidence is there that having a car alarm deters car thieves, and how does the comfort a car alarm confers weighed up against the nuisance they create when they go off at 3 and 4 and 5am? I would be interested in knowing how easy or difficult it is to disable the thing, and whether legislation exists elsewhere to tackle this.

National Poetry Day

The theme of NPD is heroes and this morning on BBC Radio Jersey I read a poem I wrote about one of my local heroes, Gerard Le Claire. Several listeners have asked to read it, so here it is:

In Memory of Gerard Le Claire

He tried so hard to look older:
glasses, goatee, gruelling missions
to the world’s end on shoestring budgets;
fresh-faced for all his pains, as if some shaman
had slipped him an elixir, at lectures
they would think a schoolboy had come to the dais.

Imagine him at sixty, walking the shoreline
between South Hill and the Dicq,
with crows’ feet, at last, and his hair silver!

Loving this place, he loved the world more -
‘The local is global’ - et cetera:
rivers in the wrong places,
downpours drumming on the sea,
the earth crazed like old china …

‘We must meet up for a beer,’ he’d say,
pumping my hand, and we had years to arrange it:
this table with its view of the sea,
a cargo ship crossing St Aubin’s Bay,
and two glasses, one empty, the other full.

Anonymous writes: ' Will you be building a toilet block in the new park so you can convert it at a later date to a cafe?'

We have been pursuing a policy wherever possible of combining the refurbishment of toilet facilities with the addition of revenue raising opportunities such as the cafés introduced in Broad Street, The Parade and Havre des Pas. Apart from helping to enhance town life in these areas (I've yet to meet anyone who doesn't think the new public square in Broad Street, with its cafe, fountains and seating, a vast improvement on what was there before), these new concessions have provided local people with job opportunities and have helped to offset the cost of toilet provision by the Parish.

It is of course unfair that St Helier ratepayers should bear the cost of toilet provision which is used by the Island and visitors. I along with most of the Parish Deputies have argued in the States Assembly that a contribution to this service should be made by the States out of general taxation. To date these arguments have fallen on deaf ears but I will continue to seek a fair deal for St Helier ratepayers in the provision of all public amenities.

Thank you, Senator Maclean

The Council of Ministers has been forced to reinstate the funding for the Millennium Town Park by one of their own members pressing the wrong button when it came to the vote. After many hours of debate -which will be available on Hansard (www.statesassembly.gov.je) in a fortnight or so - Deputy Geoff Southern summed up and called for the 'appel'. Senator Alan Maclean, formerly a Deputy for St. Helier No. 2 District in which the promised park and car park are to be built, had previously spoken against the proposition, and, one assumes, fully intended to vote against it, too.

But, he told the Greffier who was in the chair, the papers on his desk meant that the 'pour' button was pressed by mistake. The result, 23 in favour, 22 against. I missed seeing the look on the Treasury Minister's face as the Senator behind him tried in vain to have his vote changed, as I was too busy enjoying this momentous day in the States Assembly; there was even a burst of applause (most unparliamentary behaviour) over the traditional footstamping, and for States Members who have campaigned, argued, and pleaded for this particular promise by the States to be kept, it was an emotional few moments.

The four JDA members all spoke well, especially Deputy Southern, and there were persuasive arguments from the other St. Helier Deputies, apart from Deputy Ben Fox who inexplicably voted against. Daniel Wimberley, Deputy of St. Mary, made the best researched contribution, although Senator Maclean (how he must regret his hubris) chortled as he mocked the length of Daniel's speech. Perhaps the most compelling speech came from Senator Ian Le Marquand early in the debate, when he distanced himself from the Council of Ministers, recognising that the North of St. Helier Masterplan was simply a delaying tactic to avoid delivering the long-awaited preferred Millennium project for Jersey.

The Next Big Thing

Yesterday I attended the Council of Ministers for a presentation on the much hyped and slightly overdue Masterplan for the North of St. Helier, aka How to deliver the Millennium Town Park without it costing the States of Jersey a penny. This project, as its name implies, is already a decade overdue since it was voted by Jersey people as their preferred States sponsored project to mark the new Millennium, a green lung stretching from Bath Street, adjacent to the Odeon, across the private car park (the 'Talman site') and the Gas Place car park. It's also a decade since more than 16,000 people signed a petition calling for the whole site to be used for the purposes of a park, with underground car parking. And if the Council of Ministers have their way it'll be another decade before the first sod is turned and the first blade of grass sprouted.



Amongst the plethora of hiccups, false starts and delays that have probably already cost a small fortune and put a smile on the faces of a whole host of UK consultants, there have been two main problems in delivering the project: first, the issue of the contamination of the ground due to its previous use as the Island's gasworks. But I think even those most committed to the goal of stalling the project would have to admit that there is now enough information to go on in terms of dealing with the contamination - and there's even a couple of million left in the States' coffers to pay for this. (All the rest of the promised States' funding has gone, but the decontamination money is safe for the time being, so it's not all bad!)



The second reason for the delays has been the need to provide alternative car parking, as consultants' reports filed at some stage down the years determined that the original aim of underground car parking was simply not feasible. That was when the idea was dreamed up of putting a car park on the site of Ann Court ... once the residents had been rehoused and the outworn accommodation demolished, you understand. The information sign alongside the site still gives this as the timetable for delivering the park by 2012. Yet when the Housing Department started moving people out of Ann Court, nearby residents began to wonder at the wisdom of putting a multi storey car park there, rather than new sheltered housing, for example, or some decent open space - with a perfectly serviceable multi storey car park a hundred yards away in Minden Place, why build another one on Ann Court? And didn't the Island's commitment to a sustainable less car-reliant future mean that we would think twice about such a project?



The solution dreamed up by the Planning Minister was to have a masterplan of the whole area, originally promised in a few months but actually it's taken nearly twice as long, but then delay really is the common theme of this project. The consultancy that won the contract was Hopkins, who've only recently completed the Esplanade Quarter Masterplan. They asked to see me at the start of the exercise and I was pleased to have a chance to share my vision for the kind of regeneration that would follow the creation of the Town Park. These were not my views alone; they were the dreams and aspirations of literally hundreds of men, women and children who had been part of the popular movement that led to the petition; they were primary school children (now adults) whose models of the kind of park they would like to play in were put on display in the Town Hall back in the 1990s; they were members of the Millennium Park support group who canvassed the views of residents of the area.



The most important thing, I told the consultants, was that people want the whole area for a park. They don't want to be offered a compensatory area somewhere else and a smaller park here, after all, this is a pretty small park by any standard. If you run between Robin Place and Gas Place it takes how many seconds? (it will take a fit child much less). The extra width at the bottleneck of the park can be provided by incorporating the two streets as extensions of the open space, even though they would have to be paved to allow essential and emergency access. The original design, completed at the end of a two-day workshop, accepted this as gospel: that's why the petition was so specific - we don't want you to build on the park. Not a car park, not a cafe, not a toilet block, but parklkand, from one end to the other and from one side to the other (we could and should be getting the Le Seilleur building incorporated into the scheme to provide complementary services for the park). This is what I told Hopkins: by all means look at the opportunities to regenerate the surrounding area; by all means supply artists' impressions of a leafy traffic-calmed David Place, and dream of the gentrification of Bath Street, but your key job is to solve the problem of where to provide the car parking that will be displaced by the Town Park.



What have Hopkins done? They have come up with a scheme that shows a line of three-storey houses along the northern side of the bottleneck, and housing on three sides of the Gas Place car park. The site needs 'enclosing', you see (the consultants employed ten years ago argued that the creation of the park would lead to the redevelopment of the park-side properties anyway, as night follows day.) Green Street car park has found its way into the Masterplan, too, with lots of redevelopment there, and (no surprises for guessing this one) they are proposing underground car parks for the Town Park, as well as for Ann Court! Underground parking, is, after all, perfectly feasible. All of this, and there's more, at no cost to the States.



The Council of Ministers were impressed, as you would expect. Surely this would be the death knell for Deputy Southern's amendment to the Business Plan which seeks to reinstate some States funding for this States sponsored Millennium project! But more exciting than defeating Deputy Southern (such victories pall after a time) here was the perfect replacement for the Esplanade Quarter Masterplan, the multi million pound project likely to be mothballed due to the credit crunch - here was the Next Big Thing! Would it deliver the Town Park? Not in the lifetime of this Council of Ministers. But what a splendid opportunity for more consultants, and for more delay!



There is a lot to admire in the Hopkins Masterplan for the north of St. Helier, don't get me wrong. But as far as delivering the Town Park is concerned it's a blind alley. A decade ago we voted to create a park across the whole of the site, and to put the parking underground - why don't we just get on with it?