Public Meeting Being Held About College Horsted SiteMovements on the Lower Lines front have enabled the global plans of Mid-Kent College here in Medway to be moved forward, so a public meeting about the revised plans for the Horsted site has now been arranged. This will again be at the Davis Estate Community Centre (as there is no larger capacity venue anywhere around these parts) on Thursday 9 June 2005 at 7:30 pm..
This is unlikely to hold everyone who wishes to attend, so it will have to be on a first-come basis, and a second meeting will be arranged to accommodate those who were left out this time, for which purpose a list of addresses will be compiled in the Community Centre's foyer so that those people can be invited specifically to the second event.
The College senior staff, their agents and consultant, the council's planning officers and the three ward councillors will all attend this meeting and any subsequent event. The meeting will be chaired by Cllr Ron Hewett.
Over two thousand invitations (in letter form) have been printed by the council Planning Dept and—although the first batch did not have the meeting date and place for some as yet unexplained reason—these are currently being hand-delivered to households in a circle around the college site. This includes all or part of the Davis Estate, Maidtone Road, Primrose Close, Horsted Way, The Ridgeway, Walderslade Road, City Way and Cloisterham Park.
As expected, traffic issues dominated residents' objection to the housing part of the outline proposal, and doubts were expressed about the validity of a traffic survey conducted for the college which claimed that traffic would be reduced from its present level. This seems a somewhat suspect claim for fairly obvious reasons.
Indeed, the traffic situation at the junction just outside the college campus is so bad nowadays that it seems unlikely that the college itself would gain planning consent if it were just now planning to move onto the Horsted campus. That's how bad traffic there has become.
Although we, the ward councillors, were less involved in the discussion this time (to give our very vocal residents the floor more-or-less throughout) it remains our view that there should be no housing at all on the college site in future, as we have been saying throughout. We would prefer light employment exclusively, or perhaps with one or two facilities included as well, but no residential development.
Unfortunately, the college has been put into a position where it needs to derive the maximum value from sale of the site, owing to severely inadequte funding from the responsible central government department. Unlike your local council, which has a so-called vuilding repairs and maintenance fund and can even move its facilities to new locations (e.g. Chatham Library a few months ago), there is apparently no proper provision for replacing ageing public buildings from a similar governmental "pot".
This, though, is not our residents' fault and shouldn't be made into a huge problem for them.
The planning application is expected to come before the Development Control Committee in July, though the date has not yet been set.