Paul Crossley1

The Southdown PACT partnership committee met today to discuss our second PACT public meeting. The first PACT identified as its top three priorities 1. Litter 2. traffic issues 3. vandalism at the Co-op and St Josephs. A bit of a strange vote really as the over-riding issue is anti-social behaviour by a small number of young males and St Joseph's hadn't been vandalised for quite a while!

Still we had our public meeting and the PACT process being developed by the police says these then become priorities to fix. In actual fact the overwhelming effort by everyone over the last three months has been tackling the issue of the youngsters causing social issues. Our partnership includes Police, Councillors, Co-op, Somer, Councilsections - Youth, Cleansing, Parks and Highways  and of course the whole community.

Anyway the agenda is agreed:

1. presentation by Police on the issues on asb (anti social behavior) with an explanation of the various options abc (acceptable behaviour contracts) ,asbo (asb orders) etc etc

2. report back by the beat team on the police activity in our community over the last 12 weeks on asb

3. report back on priority 1 from B&NES Waste service and Somer Cleansing section

4. report back on priority 2 from B&NES Highways and Police

5. report back on priority 3 From Police

6. report back on any other priorities that have been addressed 

6. break out into small groups to discuss issues together

7. list the community concerns

8. vote on the communitie's top three priorities for addressing over the next quarter

This whole new PACT process is proving to be very labour intensive and we are going to have to look at how we manage committments of  staff as we have the system set up with a pact for every ward - 33 across B&NES. So for example we have three highway engineers covering the patch - so in theory each highway engineer could be expected to attend 10-12 PACTS.

NEXT MEETING Monday Feb 4th at the Southdown Methodist Church in The Hollow from 7pm 

ALL SOUTHDOWN RESIDENTS WELCOME