I’ve been following the 21st Century Denny group.
The aim of this group is simple, to gather public opinion, bring together ideas, create something of a plan and then take it to Falkirk Council to show that we don’t need another supermarket or a world-class car-park.

The first meeting highlighted one of the problems straight away.
Where do you hold a meeting in Denny?
You can’t really hold it in the pub and you can’t hold it in the local coffee shop……because there is no local coffee shop!

So Councillor McNally kindly offered the use of his barbers shop.
Not an ideal venue but needs must.

It was a pretty constructive meeting but the first hurdle was that the Council holding a vote on proposals for the town.
The old plan was to sell the land to a developer who wanted to attract a supermarket.
The developer had until the end of May to put in their bid or else the deal was off and the council could walk away.
That is what happened and the developer are now out of the picture.

So option B was the council to go it alone.
I posted a photo of the plan previously.

The first thing that was decided was to attend the council meeting and attend in numbers.
The second was to develop some sort of a survey.

I’m glad that the developer is out of the way because they did nothing for the town.
They had since 2004 to do something and it never happened.
It was the wrong plan for the town anyway.

Denny cross is a traffic blackspot and it causes the council a lot of concern.
Thing is, does anyone actually know what causes the traffic problems?

On my way to Reloaded Fest last week I got no further than Stirling street because of the Co-operative lorry that had got stuck across the street blocking it in both directions.
If you can’t see what causes the traffic problems in Denny and you’re involved with town planning I say resign now because I want your job.

So it was off to Falkirk for the council meeting.
We were all issued with a few documents showing the options, the costs and the advantages or otherwise.
I made a quick and nasty scan of one.

At the council meeting there was a lot of talk about building another road to the east of Denny that would join up behind the new high school.
They call it the Denny eastern access road (DEAR). – personally I’d call it the Denny eastern exit road!
It would cost about 15 million pounds to build this road which they hope to get from property developers buying land and building houses.
Which does beg the question, ‘Why the hell would you want to live here?’.

Chris and Michael from the Falkirk Herald came along, got some photos and got some comments for the paper.
They’d have nothing to do if it wasn’t for all of this!

I had to leave before they got around to discussing the Town centre.
They seemed to be too busy accusing other members of the council of being members of the Orange lodge, lacking knowledge of geography or of speaking with forked tongues.
IF you know what I mean?

The regeneration facebook page has some more details of the stuff that I wasn’t able to attend and here’s that survey again.

Post a comment below and tell me what you think?