Flitch Green News Winter 2018 Edition
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Flitch Green News Winter 2018 edition Produced for the community of Flitch Green by Flitch Green Parish Council In this issue Introduction from the Chairman of Flitch Green Parish Council 3 Your Parish Councillors 4 Flitch Green communications update 6 Little Flitchers 10 Helping to keep Flitch Green clean and tidy 11 FGPC Community award scheme 12 Community meet up 14 Community Security update 16 Parking issues in Flitch Green 18 Friends of Flitch Green Academy—meet the new Chair 19 Byelaws 21 Flitch Green Trust update 23 Gladman Land development proposal 24 2 Welcome to the Winter 2018 Christmas issue of Flitch Green News. I hope you enjoy the updates from our Parish Councillors, the Community Trust, and other contributing authors. Hopefully, together with some useful community information, and advertising by a selection of our local businesses, this issue will provide you with some interesting reading. We missed our target of producing a quarterly offering, but your Parish Councillors have not been taking it easy during the last six months. A review of the minutes on our web page shows our continuing efforts to make our village a safer, cleaner and just plain nice place to live and bring up our children. The final steps have been made towards handing over management of the leisure facilities to the Community Trust, who will manage the sports hall, the community centre and the sports field on behalf of the Parish Council There has been considerable effort towards adopting the remaining open spaces in the village, and opening them up for use by all of our residents. Additional benches have been located at many locations, along with extra litter and dog litter bins. Hopefully, this will allow people to meet and enjoy the flower tubs. These general areas will remain under the management of the Parish Council. Work is continuing on the adoption of the remaining open spaces, such as the lake. As you will read inside this magazine, we have already started our implementation of a CCTV system and it already enables us to record antisocial and criminal behaviour in key areas of the village. Our contracted security patrols provide additional vigilance at random times and locations. We are working closely with the Uttlesford Community Policing Team and sharing information in order to rid our village of the increasing evils of soft drugs and antisocial behaviour. There have been some failures. Notably, our Youth Club has closed, due to a lack of appropriate volunteers. Those who have volunteered worked with great effort and diligence, providing a great resource for our youngsters, but nobody can volunteer for ever. The Parish Council are working on a number of initiatives, including linking up with other villages, but as always, volunteers are essential. So if you have the time and would like to play a part, please let us know. Speeding in the village is a perennial, and perhaps increasing problem. But it is not as easy a problem to solve as it may initially seem. In order to apply legal pressure, it needs to be against the law, and that means our roads need to be adopted by the Highways Agency, otherwise they are legally still under control of the landowner. We are working to get all of our roads adopted, and that will allow us to apply for suitable speed limits. But the enormous amount of money Councils raise in speeding fines indicate that the real solution is education. And we are working on that with a new initiative, including traffic cameras on Station Road, and a leafletting campaign inside the village. On the plus side, new initiatives from some of our more public-spirited residents have appeared, and we are blessed with litter-picking days, children's activity days, and fetes and fairs. Added to the regular program of activities at the Community Centre, these show that we are becoming a much more integrated and complete community. And on that positive note, I shall sign off, taking the opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a prosperous and happy 2019. Terry Jack Chairman, Flitch Green Parish Council 3 Your Parish Councillors Terry Jack is the Chairman of Flitch Green Parish Council. Terry was one of the very first residents to move to Flitch Green and has been involved with the Parish Council for over five years. Like many of the Councillors he has been actively involved in planning matters and was part of the team that oversaw the planning appeal which led to the community facilities finally being completed. Helen Mason has been the Clerk to Flitch Green Parish Council since 2010. She is married with three children aged between seven and 16 and has lived in Flitch Green for the last sixteen years. In her role as the Clerk, She organises the council's regular monthly and extraordinary meetings, takes the minutes, manages the council's finances as its Responsible Finance Officer and deals with all day-to-day inquiries regarding the parish. If you have an issue that you would like to raise with the parish council, Helen can be contacted by email at [email protected], via the Flitch Green Parish Council Facebook page or by telephone on 01371 823172. John Doughty joined the parish council in 2017 and heads up our community security sub-committee. He has also been focusing on a comprehensive review of our community communications, which has included the design and development of our new website. John moved to Flitch Green from Hertfordshire in 2006, with his wife Naomi and cockapoo Bolli. He is a Director of an IT Management Consultancy company and also runs a small business consultancy based here in Flitch Green . Emma Nicholls has lived in Flitch Green for 12 years and has seen many changes to our village. She has been proud to serve on the Parish Council for 10 years, two as Chair. During this time, she represented the village during the Planning Hearing where the PC succeeded in ensuring completion of Flitch Green facilities. She now also serves as the Trust Secretary on the Community Trust. Emma lives in Flitch Green with her husband Omar and their 2 children, Harry (13) and Siena (10) and a naughty Beagle called Bo. Stephanie Harris has lived in Flitch Green for 12 years and is our longest serving Parish Councillor with 10 years’ service this year. She is also our local District Councillor. Stephanie has also served two years as Chairman of the Parish Council and joins John as Parish Council representative on the new security committee. Stephanie owns a business is town locally with her father and lives in Flitch Green with her husband Colin . 4 Your Parish Councillors (continued) Nieky van Veggel moved from Great Dunmow to Flitch Green in June 2017 with his wife Hannah and son Eric. He has always been engaged with his local community through various volunteering activities, so when he heard there were vacancies for parish councillors he applied. Nieky chairs the Byelaw Working Party which is developing the first set of byelaws for Flitch Green. In his day job he is a senior academic working on animal health and higher education policy. He looks forward to helping making Flitch Green a great place to live and grow up. Gerald Mawbey has lived in Flitch Green since 2014 and has been a Parish Councillor since 2017. Gerald is now retired but spent his entire working life as a body design engineer automotive in Europe and the USA. In his spare time Gerald paints watercolours. Steve Crawford has been a member of the Council for three years, is Vice Chairman and also a member of the Charitable Trust. Steve and his family moved onto Flitch Green 12 years ago. His wife Sue was a Co-Founder of the Flitch Green Youth Club. He spent his career developing IT solutions and was the co-founder of an eBook business which was sold in 2014. He is now retired. James Hall has been a resident of Flitch Green since 2006. Running a European Fintech business, James is a frequent visitor to Stockholm, Oslo & Riga but also finds time to be a Parish Councillor, Youth Rugby Coach and Trustee of the Children’s Charity, The Cystic Fibrosis Holiday Fund. Married to GBR Athlete, Claire, James has three children Olivia (16), Harry (13) & Natasha (11) and a Black Labrador called Buddy. Tom Loveday originally lived on Flitch Green back when it was called Oakwood Park, then moved to Dunmow for a few years. He moved back to Flitch Green in March 2017 and became a Councillor in November 2017. Please say hello if you see him out and about walking his dog! 5 Flitch Green Communications As residents, we all want to keep up-to-date with important community issues and events, including community security developments and things like planning applications. Given that the demographic of Flitch Green is largely families, most people will be digitally connected in some way but there are a small minority who are not. Facebook is still a great channel for our communications, but it has recently decided to be “unkind” to community pages, by making some radical changes to its newsfeed algorithm. These changes mean that some people won’t see any of our posts – this is because, by default, Facebook doesn’t think you want to see them! Several residents have mentioned that they have missed posts from various groups in the village, some of which were important community updates. There are some very simple changes you can make in your Facebook settings to overcome this and these are described later on in this article – please take the time to implement these so that you don’t miss anything.