Not Treading on Toes

Regular readers will  probably recall that I have mentioned the care I take before and when putting a case for work to be done in my home area. After all, my aim is to improve matters that seemingly wouldn't otherwise be dealt with, not for the sake of building up a dossier of personal achievements (though that does follow on naturally from work that I successfully arrange to be done).

I am really mentioning this only in case the local Labour councillors might try to suggest that I am encroaching on 'their' territory for 'my' own ends. It would be typical of local Labour to try that angle, though they have never had reason to do so.

To show why they have no real scope to try this on, let me exemplify one case of a road near my home that really does need to be re-surfaced. It's a short road, so the work would be relatively inexpensive, and it is a side road that isn't even useful as a cut-through, so no disruption to traffic flow would occur while the repairs were being made and setting. Readers might find this interesting as pointing to a resource they might care to access periodically for their own locality, for one thing.

This case of mine is about Afghan Road in Chatham, which is in a real state of disrepair throughout its 50-metre length. It's a L-shaped road, bent almost in the middle of its length. However, a look at Medway ELGIN (the Electronic Local Government Information Network) shows that the work is already in the pipeline, and indeed is treated as current.

Here's the complete display of the close-up of this road, showing both current and planned work...

Oddly, there is one symbol just at the western entrance to the road, and another a little way in from that. I tried looking separately as current work...

 ...and work still being planned...

Aha! I do not know what this means, as the symbols do not have clickable links to show what work is to be done there or when, and even exploring elsewhere (on the council's main website) discloses little else, even when these jobs appear in the widget in this 'blog's right sidebar. It is not clear in this case whether the work will cover both sections of the road – though from previous experience with other jobs I'd expect that to be the case. What appears on ELGIN isn't always that precise, I have noticed!

The bottom line is that there is no need for me to intervene in this instance, and I shall merely keep an eye on progress and ensure (by inspection when the time comes) that a good, complete job is done.

So, there it is; and I hope it has been useful to show just a part of how I check what is already in train before acting on matters that need attention. It's for the community, not for my esteem, and I will not take up council staff's time on matters that don't need a contact from me.

Perhaps the most useful message to come from this post is the benefit of modern technology in making it far easier to do all this background research nowadays than it was just a few years ago, when Medway's fledgling GISMO system was not fully publicly accessible and was somewhat limited in what was available outside the council's offices.

As a 'guinea pig' for remote access experiments at the time, I well recall those early days and the difficulties I and other councillors had when we weren't in the Civic Centre or at Municipal Buildings. In the end, I created my own version of GISMO just for my 'patch', using ArtWorks2 and its layers facility to achieve much the same results.

Every waste bin, every school, every Post Office and every traffic light was (and still is) on that file, and several other categories besides, as well as aerial photographs – though in the end I never did go around the ward just to painstakingly note the location and reference number of every street lamp! There's a blank layer just waiting for me to do so...