Community Council elections – Longstone CC are building bridges

Nominations have just opened for new members to put themselves forward to their local community council.

Alan Gordon, the Secretary of Longstone Community Council, is keen to emphasise the benefits to everyone of becoming a member of a community council.

He said: “We’re actually in quite a healthy position as a community council with 10 members. I think our gender balance is better now but what we want to work on is making sure our community council looks like our community. I’m currently musing on how we can get that message out there to people. We want all backgrounds, abilities and disabilities. If we’re not making the best use of the talent in our community then know we’re worse off for that.”

Each community council area has a geographical boundary – you can find all of these on a map on the council website.

Anyone who wants to become a member must be on the electoral register within the geographical boundary of their community council area. Nominees also need somebody to nominate or propose and second them.

Community councillors are generally people interested in their local community who want to make a difference. And Longstone CC – in collaboration with their local councillors at times – have made a difference.

Listen to our chat about the community council and recent wins below:

We asked Alan for a good example of what Longstone has achieved. He said: “Well the former Booker site next to Sainsbury’s in Longstone is one. We’ve known for quite a long time that that was going to be a proposed development and it was closed for quite a while and then it was demolished.

“Then a pre-application notice came forward for it. it’s always been in our mind that there could be a bridge crossing there. In years past it did not materialise, but fast forward 10 years and we’ve moved on as a city – as all cities have in terms of active travel aspirations.

“So the mood music’s changed and there’s an opportunity there. When the development came up everybody in our community (and we certainly encourage them to feedback via the pre-application notice consultation with the architects) offered their thoughts on the development and that we need an active travel route, a new bridge there to link our community to the Hutchison/Chesser community.

“The planning application came to the DM subcommittee. One of our local councillors, Cllr Ross McKenzie, had requested a hearing. We then spoke to that, as did our local councillors and Water at Leith Conservation Trust. With that combination we were able to make a very good case at the planning committee of why there should be a bridge there.

“We said that the developer should provide some money via a Section 75 order towards our bridge crossing. Planning officers disagreed with that and said it wasn’t possible. We took issue with it and said we thought it was possible.

“To be fair to the developer, they did then redesign the development, make a path that’s protected in the city development plan at that time as a potential link. The outcome of all that was that the developer decided that could they take the meeting offline for 10 minutes and go away and have a bit of a chat about it. And they came back and there is now £170,000 worth of contributions on the table for 10 years from the developer as part of that. So if we hadn’t made that argument and had taken what the planning officers had said at face value, we wouldn’t have got £170,000 pounds

“Where we are now, essentially, is the council have now put it on their list of upcoming consultations as the Longstone Link project. It’s also within the Transport Environment Committee rolling action log. So they’re expecting to launch a consultation on this.”

Another one that excites Alan is the establishment of a junior park run in the southwest of the city. This is something being done in partnership with another organisation called SW20. Paul, who’s their secretary, is a very keen park runner.

Alan said: “It is quite far along at the moment, but we don’t have an exact launch date yet. We can’t get that until we’ve ticked all the boxes that are required. But I’m anticipating around about Easter. We’ve got a great cohort of people signed up as potential volunteers. Where we’re exactly at just now is where we’ve, I think, got our run directors – about six of them now. So we’re just about to go through some PVG checking and training as run directors.”

For this project Longstone CC applied to the Southwest Community Grant Fund to establish a park run. There is a one-off payment of around £4,800.

If there is any need for any elections in any of the 47 community councils in Edinburgh that will be held on27 March.

If you are a member of a community council and would like to tell us your story then please get in touch.