Larch Crescent

Residents of Larch Crescent have been plagued for a number of years by teenagers playing football on the patch of grass in front of their bungalows, kicking the ball into their gardens and causing damage. It's the age old story of the patch of grass available being too small for what the young people need. Quite why they won't go over the road to Preston Park I don't know.
Tristar have done the consultation for us and we're prepared to spend some of our Environmental Improvement Budget on doing some planting in the area, but it's proving tricky to work out which department can do the design. We'll get there in the end!
Meanwhile we've chased up a request that was made 3 years ago by the then councillor for Preston Ward to have some goal posts erected in Preston Park with the aim of encouraging teenagers to go there rather than these small patches of grass. The goal posts never appeared but we'll see what's said this time.
Stockton Council's engineers told us today that the developers of Allen's West and Urlay Nook Rd warehousing proposal have agreed on a package of road widening measures at the Tesco roundabout to mitigate the impact of their developments. According to the wonderful computer programme which calculates these things for local authorities if they widen the splay at the roundabout everything will be fine, except for the bottleneck caused by Yarm High Street which isn't their problem. So the engineers have no option now but to accept that these developments can be accommodated, despite the fact that we all know that the Yarm High St issue is the biggest problem for this area and won't be relieved at all by any of these measures.
Planning committee on July 2nd will be a difficult one. Decision day for both of these developments, both the subject of serious objections by residents but both looking increasingly as though they're proving able to answer the material planning objections.