In our last update, we mentioned the importance of us getting on board some professional experts to help strengthen our arguments and to speak in support of them in the Public Hearings we’ll be involved in after Christmas.
We have now been able to commission some Sound Consultants and have had a very good quote from some air quality consultants for the production of initial reports on the flaws in Jones Brothers' own Noise and Air Quality reports. The Sound Consultants kindly gave us a lot of free help with our latest comments, submitted to the PEDW Planning Inspector, on Jones Brothers’ responses to her queries.
Having our own, professionally produced Noise and Air Pollution reports will enable us to submit very strong Hearing Statements for the Public Hearings on Noise and Air that we’ve been invited to contribute to in the new year.
Thanks to the generosity of several kind donors on our GoFundMe page, we are now be able to pay the Sound Consultants' ‘reduced rate’ cost of £700 for their initial report. However, we will definitely need to raise more funds for the initial report of the Air Quality Consultants and for all of the other work going forward that we will need from these and other experts- in particular: work on a similar report covering flaws in JB’s Air Quality arguments; attendance by both consultants to speak in support of our arguments at the relevant public hearings; production of post-hearing reports and future work in the likely event of JB appealing any decisions that go against them.
Having now had some indicative costings for this work, the Caernarfon Lân Committee has estimated that we need to set a GoFundMe target of £10,000 to enable us to sustain and win the battle to stop Jones Brothers’ two polluting developments.
So we are now putting out an urgent request for everyone to make whatever contribution they feel they can afford to help stop those threatened developments in their tracks….!
You can do that easily on our GoFundMe site - just click here or paste the following address into your browser: https://gofund.me/bf3da840As
As we explained in our last update, our treasurer is a professional person with experience of public sector auditing, so your money will be safe! Also, if we should all be very lucky and find that we have raised more funds than we need to win the battle, then we will give everyone a chance to vote for some relevant good causes to pass any surplus on to.
So do please add your own bit of weight now to help win the fight!
Here is a quick update on key issues and important dates going forward:
On the concrete-crushing application:
- Gwynedd Planning Committee will meet on the 9th December to decide on the Concrete processing and road change application.
- A representative of Caernarfon Lân will be allowed to speak for three minutes at that meeting to summarise our case against the proposals; Local councillor, Menna Trenholme, who is very supportive of our cause, will also address the committee.
- The Committee is putting together a collection of damning video evidence showing the recent movements of HGV loads on to the site seemingly in breach of recent planning conditions and the instructionsto desist, issued by the Council to Jones Brothers. We will send a link to those videos to the Council’s Planning and Public Protection Teams, and to all our supporters, as soon as it is available.
On the Gas Peaking Plant application:
- With excellent help from our barrister and our sound consultant, Caernarfon Lân submitted to the PEDW Inspector a strong set of comments on Jones Brothers’ responses to her 14 queries - if you haven’t already clicked the link above, you can click here to see what we sent.
- We now have until 31st January to submit three, 3,000 word Hearing Statements to be taken into account at the three Hearings we’ve been invited to take part in: Noise, Air Quality and Planning - with your help we will get more expert advice on all of that…..
- The hearings will take place in the week commencing 17th February. They will be ‘public’, i.e. for anyone to attend, and our Senedd Member, Sian Gwenllian will be pressing for those meetings to be held in Caernarfon - we will let you all have further details as soon as we know them.