Thanet District Council Meeting Tomorrow, Animal Exports, Airport, Webcasting, Standards.

It looks like this meeting will be covering a lot of issues and I will write something here later today about them if I get time.

The picture above is of a Ramsgate Council meeting, this presumably comes from a time when one was allowed to take pictures of council meetings.

First night flights, there are some night flights occurring around this point in time, my understanding is that these are to fly food to our troops in Afghanistan, I don’t think that anyone I know in Ramsgate objects to these flights.

But it does surprise me that the airport hasn’t taken advantage of this opertunity for positive publicity.

I don’t think the airport operator has any concept of taking the town of Ramsgate with them on anything at all, minor pr opportunities like announcing when the Red Arrows or some other interesting aircraft are likely to be flying over the town, so that residents have an opportunity to take a picture, seem to be something they have missed.

One of the noisest and most disruptive businesses in Ramsgate was the Sally Line and yet this business was well supported by Ramsgate residents. Infratil just don’t seem to have got the message and will fly a noisy plane at 7am on still Sunday morning low over the town when the obviously don’t need to or carry on endless low training flights over the town when they could obviously do this somewhere where hardly anyone lives. Well now the have got lot peoples backs up and they mostly have themselves to blame.

Night flights has become a party political issue, how daft can you get, well I suppose as flights over Ramsgate have even been a racist issue, anything goes.

Rumour is that there is Infratil are keen to sell Manston and that some other operators have been sniffing around, as Infratil lost £3m last year on their UK airport business this raises the interesting question of what anyone would pay for a business that loses that much a year. 


I suppose the only logical way forward for the airport is to expand the aspect of it that has been successful which mostly relates to aviation heritage, a base for air shows and short haul flights that don’t make much noise anyway.    

There will be a question for the leader I suppose like a mini PMQ, this is what it says:

“1.1       According to Council Procedure Rule 14, a Member of the Council may ask a Member of the Cabinet or the Chairman of any Committee or Sub-Committee, a question on any matter in relation to which the Council has powers or duties or which affects the district, providing they have given at least five working days notice in writing of the question, limited to fifty words.

2.0       The Current Situation

2.1       On 4 July 2011, the Democratic Services & Scrutiny Manager received from Councillor Poole the following question addressed to Councillor Bayford:

2.2       “Substantial ERDF grants were given to a number of local businesses during the early 2000s, following a stringent process of selection.   Will you explain why, from 2003 onwards, there wasn’t an effective process to ensure the monies were spent according to the strict criteria used when the grants were agreed?”

I am not so sure what it means.

On to the business of webcasting council meetings, apparently at the moment it costs the council about £250 in staff costs to convert the DVD, that they already make, into the right file format and put it online.

Anyone who has ever put a dvd on Youtube will probably wonder if they paid an officer to sit there while the file converted and went up on the internet.

To me converting a video file means opening it in the right program and going off and doing something else while the computer gets on with the job and then coming back and finding the file in your Youtube account, clicking on upload and then going off and doing something else while it uploads.

When the idea was first suggested I told the council that if they sent me the dvd I would be happy to put it online for them, for nothing. The dvds get made anyway you understand.    

Then there is the live animal transport motion, this isn’t something you have to clean up with a shovel, but the following:

1.1.      Council Procedure Rule No. 16 governs the process for motions on notice being submitted to Council.  

1.2.1        The following motion on notice has been received from Councillor Fenner in accordance with the Council Procedure Rules:

“Council resolves to seek a legal opinion on whether TDC can lawfully ban the transportation of live farm animals from the Port of Ramsgate on the ground that they are ‘sentient beings’ and not ‘goods’.” 

Update, news of the council meeting is slowly filtering out, with Simon Moores rather bizarre tweet “After a very long day indeed, tonight's Council meeting was best viewed through the lens of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland'”

And this from the Labour group http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/711/id8.htm

Nothing from the council press and information department yet.