The New Penzance Town Council

Well that’s it then, the people have spoken, the votes have been counted, Penzance Town Council has its councillors for the next 4 years.

Of the 20 councillors who make up the Town Council 8 are new to the job replacing 6 who stood down at this election and 2 who lost their seats.

Although in the past the political make up of the council has never been a factor in decision making, the make up of this council is quite interesting being a bit like Noah’s Ark we have 2 Liberal Democrats, 2 A Future For Penzance, 2 Greens, 2 Labour, 2 Mebyon Kernow and 10 Independents, what no conservatives you may ask? Trust me there’s at least 3 in there.

Of the 8 new councillors I really only know 2 of them, with a nodding acquaintance with 2 of the others. None as far as I can tell have ever held political office before.

I have read all the leaflets and the Facebook pages of those candidates that have them and sadly some are in for a bit of a shock when they actually get down to the work of being a town councillor.

Town Councils have limited amounts of money and even more limited resources, we are not free to do what we want or even what the Town may need, sadly a lot of our time over the past few years has been spent trying to get Cornwall Council to do the right thing and this has been getting increasingly harder as budget cuts bite ever further into spending.

Planning, is probably the area new councillors have the biggest problem getting to grips with, but fundamentally if there is not a ‘Planning Reason’ for objection you can’t object, well you can but it wont get you anywhere.

All in all I'm looking forward to working with the new councillors who will I'm sure bring new ideas to the council, I just hope that their enthusiasm does not get smothered by the rules and regulations within which we do have to work and of which so many people are blissfully unaware.