Leith Central Community Council (LCCC) met on Monday 24 September. Stormy night: warm welcome, Leith Walk on the agenda. Ella Taylor-Smith reports.
The coming improvement works on Leith Walk, Constitution Street and Picardy Place were the main topic of the meeting. City Centre and Leith Neighbourhood Manager Ian Buchanan had come along from City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) to give an update and answer questions – even if he had to say he didn’t know.
CEC has a webpage about the improvements which they promise to keep up to date. Please go there for Council factoids. It’s also the place to go for the pre-consultation collection of suggestions.
[img_assist|nid=3409|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=176|height=200]Schedules
CEC is currently working out what needs to be done in terms of sorting out the utility works (underground services), and hopes to get started later in the autumn.
The plan is to start at Constitution Street and work up, in sections. Officials think this will be about 4 months’ work.
Funding
The work has a budget of £5.5 million. The last LCCC meeting (20 August) established where this money was coming from: £3.2m from Services for Communities and the rest from the trams budget. Could the contractors who did or didn’t do the utilities work last time (for the trams) contribute to the sorting-out costs? Would Services for Communities go short? These questions weren’t pursued at the September meeting. Suffice to say that any costs in addition to the £5.5 million would come out of the trams budget. (Additional funds are coming from another budget for the greening of the Picardy Place roundabout.)
Consultation
At the moment, CEC staff are working through the input they’ve gathered from community groups, pressure groups and public meetings, as well as collecting ideas via the website. This is feeding into designs for the consultation proper to focus on. The consultation kicks off in the next couple of months, with focus groups scheduled for early November.
[img_assist|nid=3408|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=133]Accessibility
Is this consultation accessible to older people, disabled people, people without Internet access? Because the Walk isn’t!
We know the road/road surface is a challenge for (and threat to) cyclists, but the pavements are also in a bad way. Old people and disabled people are really struggling to get about on them. If it will be another winter before the pavements are fixed, then this will represent a real problem. Could the Council at least get onto the bits outside post offices?
Maybe CEC officials could take the consultation onto the streets and potter around with locals as they struggle to traverse Leith Walk’s lunar surfaces?
[img_assist|nid=3410|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=108]This kind of accessibility shouldn’t be a consultation issue. CEC is signed up to the World Health Organisation’s Checklist of Essential Features of Age-Friendly Cities Edinburgh was one of the pilot cities and the Policy and Strategy Committee had an update on this in their last meeting. ('A City for All Ages Progress Report').
Mr Buchanan made it clear that getting the carriageway surfaced and the pavements slabbed were basics and not really part of the consultation, but it seems that all the other stuff in the consultation needs to be decided before the pavements can be tackled.
It was also suggested that beer delivery men were dropping barrels straight onto the pavement without using their little pillows. The pavement can’t take this kind of abuse. I can’t imagine this happening in central Spurtleshire. Witnesses to the contrary?