29/10/10……’Last nail in the town council’s coffin’ says Thame resident

DEAR EDITOR, It seems the Mayor of Thame has hammered in the last nail in the Thame Town Council’s coffin of credibility in regard to his deciding vote, taken in respect to the Council’s claim to support a major housing development at the Pig Farm location bounded by the Oxford Road and the A418 by-pass (known as Site F).

Throughout the whole of October the Town Council has been represented by certain Councillors and the Town Clerk as favouring Site F for development, as against the earlier accepted site known a Site D, on the other side of the Phoenix Trail. Apparently, this earlier claim was far from the truth, as at a special meeting on Tuesday of this week, the attending Town Councillors were evenly split over the matter and the Mayor cast his deciding vote in favour of recommending Site F to the South Oxfordshire District Council, where the real decision making authority lays.

How the Mayor can justify his position on making his vote in favour of Site F defies belief. During the month prior to the meeting, the Town Council launched a consultation process including a market stall a week last Tuesday, an exhibition within the Town Hall, a special cover edition of the Thame Gazette and a Public Meeting at St Mary?s Church last Monday evening to explain and gather resident opinion, plus a rather questionable “Straw Poll” ballot in which residents could volunteer to participate and show a preference for either Site D or site F.

All of this consultation process has been heavily propagandised by various ?pseudo? council officials as already being a “Done Deal” in favour of Site F and the consultation was used as a way of gaining further consolidation of their views from the public.

In the event, it was quite plain at the very well attended public meeting held in St Mary’s Church (the place was packed to the rafters) that residential opinion erred well on the side of opposition to Site F. Of course the Mayor and members of the platform chose not to make a summary of the audience input, nor give the attendees any indication of the influence they might have gained by attending the meeting. There was absolutely no summing up at the end of the meeting and no Town Council officer recorded any minutes of the meeting. Meanwhile, the public audience was banned from recording the meeting themselves.

The, questionable, “Straw Poll ballot” has also revealed a significant vote in favour of recommending Site D, rather than the pig farm Site F. I understand that the votes favouring Site D amounted to 225, whereas the votes cast for Site F only reached 205 at the time of the Council meeting on Tuesday evening.

I now question how the Mayor and leader of this cosy cartel of Councillors, given this significant evidence of preference from those residents sufficiently moved to make the effort of voting and/or attending public meetings, can go against them and cast a deciding vote in Council against them and in favour of Site F. One might be inclined to suspect a strong whiff of self-interest when one realises that the Mayor?s own home lays very close to the, otherwise, preferred site D.

I am sure that the South Oxfordshire District Council are aware of the shenanigans perpetrated by members of the Thame Town Council over the past month or two and will take due account of their discredited presentation.

Raymond W L Powell
Union Way
Thame

PHOTO: A packed St Mary’s church at the recent Core Strategy public meeting.