New Houses

You have probably heard of  Uttlesford’s Option 4. It was for thousands of houses on land beyond the railway. We were all dead against it but it was beginning to look as if we were going to lose with Fairfield putting out premature publicity. Now it looks as if our protests have borne fruit.

In the current Saffron Walden Weekly News there is a report on a meeting of Uttlesford’s Cabinet for Communities which is reported to have approved a figure of 3,314 houses but not on the previously proposed new settlement site. While huge, this number is to be spread through the district. We need to wait for the minutes to be sure but if true, our worries are over. The figure of 3,314 was big enough to swamp our resources but not big enough to get its own.

Already we have been forced to accept hundreds of new homes on an in-fill basis which will overload all our infrastructure and will have to count towards our share of the district’s total. But the monster new settlement appears to be dead, at least for the foreseeable future. If we get a fair share we will be in trouble for virtually all of our utilities and services but to end up with a new town with a railway splitting it in two is not now going to happen. Possibly the recent deaths have been part of the reasoning.

TriSails development

The last parish council meeting was subjected to much undeserved verbal abuse because it was thought that the Council had not done enough. This was in fact the third iteration of the proposals the first two having been severely challenged by the Council. Both attempts were successfully blocked by a number of key points. Notably we insisted that the towers were too high and the traffic generated by the new jobs would overload our already overused roads. When the third iteration of the application arrived we noted that all our concerns had been addressed, the towers were lower and the number of jobs reduced hence a reduction in peak time cars. There had also been a traffic survey that showed that the majority of jobs would be filled by out of town people and so the majority of cars would pass through to and from the East

As we had already made our objections clear twice we were advised that they were fully accessible on file and that further repetition would not be helpful. Try as we might we could not come up with anything new to use in opposition but were content that we had reduced the impact of the scheme. The buildings now barely topped the tree line and traffic problems if any, were going to be outside our area.

As a point to note a successful opposition now followed by an appeal triggers scrutiny by a Planning Inspector via the Secretary of State. Said Secretary of State was instrumental in the demand for new houses and the resulting demand for new jobs. We thus conclude that we had got all we were going to get and moved our resources to the issues surrounding the Sand Quarry and Crown Estate threats.

Orchard

Our attempts to oppose the Orchard development have failed and we now expect the development to go ahead and all the undesirable consequences we predicted will now follow. Nothing has been done to ease of traffic problems except that the “acceptable” delay has been changed. A traffic pinch point is now only recognised if delays exceed 12 minutes or so on an average basis.

Power cuts here are common in the winter but we have already had two without explanation, water pressure continues to drop and nobody wants to go and look at what state our sewers are in

The CROWN ESTATE

 The Crown Estate seems to have acquired the land to the west and behind the playing field and are planning to build on it. There seems to be a good chance that plans for this will be passed and even some Parish Councillors are in favour of it but I am not. With the Orchard development plus numerous in-fill projects we must now be approaching our fair share of the local needs. The problems with traffic at Grove Hill have worsened and the Tri-Sails development now in its third iteration will produce a share of the 400 plus commuter cars (thought to be around 40%) through the village. The Parish Council has successfully opposed this twice now but the current plans address all our objections so this time we expect it to go through.

This all adds up to a serious traffic overload beyond the periodic gridlock we frequently experience and a few hundred more houses behind Leigh Drive will surely take us well beyond reasonable tolerance.

Crown Estates have booked the Village Hall for the 5th November for a Public Presentation please attend. If the normal village apathy happens and the development goes through you will only have yourselves to blame if I am proved right.

Geof

SAND QUARRY

An application has been received to extend the size of the sand quarry. It was a box full I could barely lift. After two days studying it I found it impossible to find any worthwhile points to raise in objection. For some while now, on any application “we don’t want it here” has ceased to be accepted as a valid objection, we have to raise individual detailed objections capable of analysis and detailed substantiation.

The golf course is where the original pit was and the landfill site was the second. This the third is very hard to block because over time every conceivable objection and complaint has been accommodated. I looked at the quantities and the lorries will not be an issue because they have done it for years and the landfill site has now closed. Overall then the lorries will be fewer.

It did not help that a while back a scare story circulated that various folk were going to lose their gardens. This was my first point for scrutiny and its not true. Local residents are being protected by earth bunds to reduce noise and pollution and nobody is close enough to be seriously affected in comparison to the various in-fill building projects in the village.

Any objection was going to be judged against the value of the deposit to the local economy, the sand is of a type that requires virtually no processing to become ideal for building mortar and while there are similar sites nationally they are few and distant.

After the deposit is exhausted there is a contractual condition that the land is returned to a state fit for agriculture but no in fill will be used so the land will be in the form of a smooth depression. Some concern has been expressed in respect of contamination of the ground water as various boreholes could be affected by light particles released by the deeper extractions now closer to them. This has been written up and submitted by way of formal comment but no other objectionable aspects have been found that could be used against such large levels of precedent.

Elsewhere on this web-site you will find many other papers from many other highly qualified authors whose work I have used to form my own opinions and the key one is below. Look closely at the graph and note the regular “wiggle” on it. The curve the doomsayers love to cite has the “wiggle smoothed off, the curve below is as it comes. If the CO2 is “ours” then there will be no wiggle because as we burn fuel it dumps CO2 and that’s it. In parts per million globally this variation is small but in terms of tons of CO2 its vast. The wiggle is a seasonal fluctuation but our consumption is quite steady so what is it? My work has taken me via the carbon cycle into the world’s oceans where a rise in temperature leads to the release of vast amounts of CO2 but a fall in temperature takes it all back again. There is no arguing with long term cyclic global temperature change which lines up well with solar activity especially sunspots and the seasonal variation is just that.

Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) is a premier atmospheric research facility  that has been continuously monitoring and collecting data related to  atmospheric change since the 1950's. The undisturbed air, remote  location, and minimal influences of vegetation and human activity at MLO are ideal for monitoring consituents in the atmosphere that can cause  climate change. The observatory is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric  Administration (NOAA) - Earth  System Research Laboratory (ESRL) - Global Monitoring Division (GMD).

This then is my contribution to our recession, there is absolutely no point in spending any more money on this CARBON FOOTPRINT HOAX

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IT TURNS OUT THAT SPAM  ADDRESS HARVESTERS ARE DUMB ROBOTS. TO BEAT THEM I AM GIVING MY ADDRESS  BUT NOT IN A FORM THAT THE ROBOTS WILL BE ABLE TO SEE. IN THE FOLLOWING SIMPLY SUBSTITUTE @FOR AT

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