Tuesday 16 June 2015

Another twist in the link road


There's yet another twist over the funding for the Carmarthen West link road. As I reported, last week's full council meeting approved borrowing of over £3m to 'pre-fund' the link road for the controversial 1100 home Carmarthen West development. The council issued a press release laden with spin, but curiously they omitted the ££ figures.

The issue of the road funding had caused a hiccup earlier this year for one of the planning applications on the site, for 250 homes, from Carmarthen Promotions Ltd, based in Suffolk.
Like the Grillo developers this company also includes a wealthy lord on it's Board of Directors.
The Executive Board then obligingly approved the road funding but the decision had to go to full council last week.

Disappointingly, given that much of the information was already in the public domain, the council voted to go into secret session, despite a call from Cllr Caiach not to do so. (see also here).

An article in the Western Mail this evening suggests a possible reason why they turned off the webcams.

Last October S4C announced that it would be relocating its headquarters to Carmarthen, close to the University. A move welcomed by councillors with great excitement.

According to Cllr Caiach, the message put across by officers to councillors at last week's meeting was that if they didn't agree to the borrowing, S4C would not move to Carmarthen.

Either this was a bit of deliberate scaremongering to make certain that councillors gave their approval, or S4C are holding the local authority to ransom and marching it off to the corporate cashpoint. At the moment I'm leaning towards the former rather than the latter.


Carmarthenshire council under fire over new road linked to S4C relocation



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