As in Southwell Town Council there are fewer meetings of the District Council in December, and the new cycle of meetings has only recently restarted.

Southwell Market – the District Council is retendering the setting up and running of the market – but not allowing the Town Council to run it on behalf of the town residents and the traders.

One of the key decisions was taken at the Planning Committee. In January the Committee decided to reject the plans for the two turbines on the south side of Brackenhurst Hill. The plans were submitted by NTU. Committee meetings are held on a Tuesday afternoon, and due to working, I was unable to attend either the site visit in the morning or the meeting in the afternoon. As this is a Halloughton Parish area, the Town Council was not represented.

Julian Hamilton gave the town’s views of the plans. Julian reminded the Planning Committee that STC planning committee supported the application. Moreover that the officers reported that views  from almost all the sites around clearly were very little damaged by the application – the only places considered with substantial visual damage were Brackenhurst itself and the Minster.  Julian went on to say that he didn’t think it was the job of the NSDC planning to protect the applicant from its self or to protect the Minster from the STC and that the planning application should be permitted.

However, the recommendation was to reject the plan, citing the impact on the views from the Minster as a major reason for turning the plan down. There was a certain lack of clarity in the application which did not help as to why there were two Turbines and exactly who was going to gain the Community benefit from the second.

Christine Rose, the Cllr for Sutton-on-Trent has worked on a Working Party looking at the future of the Palace Theatre. The Theatre has a fairly high subsidy, at just under £05m a year, and appears to have declining attendances. After looking at a number of options to keep the theatre active in Newark, Christine Rose is recommending that the council out source the management of the Theatre to attempt to keep it live, and stabilise the subsidy paid from the District Council tax payers.

It is a pity that little regard is given in the options to linking in with the new, supposed, National Civil War Museum (bringing in one hopes bus loads of tourists and schoolchildren) one could envisage the rather cramped museum extending into the theatre next door which would make an ideal lecture hall for the daytime Museum audience for example on tactics in the Civil War year by Year.

There was an interesting debate on the development of the Newark to Nottingham train service from December 2013. East Midlands Trains specifically asked the Council to keep information on this confidential at present, and we agree to this. Peter Harris was able to make a number of points to try to improve the service from our local station at Fiskerton. As soon as we are able to report back on the outcomes of this matter, Peter will do so.

The floods at the end of December were, we are pleased to say, less troubling for many residents than a couple of years back. It is clear that there are problems at a number of locations around the town, and these were raised at the Town Forum too. The District Council’s Emergency Plan ran effectively, we believe. NCC Highways also responded positively, including manually clearing some dykes, particularly on the Hockerton Road. Peter Harris, as the Council’s Flood Warden tried to pass information on to residents via Twitter and Facebook and had a number of useful and important exchanges with residents using this way of communicating.

There is a Cabinet Meeting on Thursday Jan 17. One of the matters it is discussing is raising the rent for houses in Southwell, some increases will be over 6% on top of rises of over 5% in the previous two years. Peter supported a proposal to bid for grant to build 25 new houses for the elderly in Bilsthorpe using some of the £4.9m surplus that the Council Housing Account has built up on the past few years.