If you never attend Helston Town Council meetings, you'll never know what really happens. "Oh, but I can just read the minutes", you might claim, but you would be wrong. When things get interesting, the minute taker can no longer keep up and the minutes will simply say "Following a detailed debate, Cllr So-and-so proposed..."
If you never attend Helston Town Council meetings, you'll never know what really happens. "Oh, but I can just read the minutes", you might claim, but you would be wrong. When things get interesting, the minute taker can no longer keep up and the minutes will simply say "Following a detailed debate, Cllr So-and-so proposed..."The minutes aren't meant to be more than a precis, so unless you attend you'll never hear one councillor talk at length about the dangers of Ragwort, until he eventually has to be brought to heel by the chair. You certainly won't read about the chair offering to do a rendition of 'Huey & Ralph' at the mayor's request, to illustrate why the mayor couldn't be at the meeting.
More importantly, you won't understand the jockeying that takes place seemingly every time someone puts forward a straightforward proposal.
For instance, in July, one councillor proposed that the council should make a special effort to let the public know what it is doing to address the climate emergency. Now there are some councillors who seem to find it necessary to object to, and amend, any proposal put forward by another. So 'following a detailed debate', this proposal was amended to say that Helston Town Council would simply publicise all its activities:
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RESOLVED – that the Council publicise details of all of its activities via the Council’s website, social media pages and other non-digital means.
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The minutes of the meeting simply can't do justice to the wrangling that went on in the room, until what the council was left with was essentially that they would have a community engagement policy. But of course the council already has a Community Engagement Policy, which you can find on their website here.
Attending the meetings, you might also be struck by a division in the council that you will not see in the minutes, but has spilled onto the pages of Facebook recently. There seems to be a division between the 'old' councillors i.e. those eight remaining from the May elections and the six newly elected councillors. With one occasional exception they even sit divided, with the old guard on one side of the chamber, and the newer councillors on the right.
The newer councillors are understandably trying to bring new energy and ideas to the council, while the older councillors can seem resistant to change*. And so it seems inevitable that proposals from the newer bunch are superficially welcomed as 'interesting', then get watered down until they become virtually meaningless. This is what happened this week in the ongoing debate about the town's pesticide policy, but I'll save that for a later post.
In short, try to get along to your local council meetings; they might be tedious at times, but they're a lot more interesting than what gets reported in the minutes.
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(*Full disclosure, two of the 'new' councillors are members of Helston Climate Action Group, which I chair. With numerous other ideas they bring to the council, I imagine they share my view that the council could be showing more leadership in the community in addressing climate change. Despite having declared a climate emergency back in 2019, the council now seems reluctant to follow through on any meaningful proposals to bring this important issue more front and centre in their decision making.)