With pledges from businesses and other organisations of £10,000 towards Christmas lights for Epsom Town Centre, Residents' Party councillors refused to "match" this level of funding as they had originally agreed.
Epsom & Ewell borough council will not prepare any action plan to deal with air pollution levels in Ewell High Street "until we receive any dire problems", according to the Chairman of their Social Committee, answering a formal question at a meeting of the borough council on Tuesday 22nd July.
At a meeting on 22nd July, the borough council will be asked to look again at the findings of the 2007 Residents' Survey.
Epsom & Ewell's Lib Dem councillors are asking the borough council by way of a "Motion to Council" to plan an Epsom Town Centre for the future.
The amendments to the South-East Plan proposed by the Secretary of State this week, in response to the Independent Panel Report on the draft prepared by the Regional Assembly, do not appear to further increase the demand for additional new housing sites in Epsom & Ewell, which could only have been provided at the expense of the Metropolitan Green Belt.
As a result of parental appeals, the Schools Adjudicator has announced that over-subscribed Southfield Park Primary School is to start admitting 60 pupils per year instead of 30, starting from September 2009. There will also be a formal catchment area, limited mainly to Clarendon Park and Livingstone Park, plus a few roads adjacent to the school gates. Extraordinarily, within that catchment area, pupils living FURTHEST from the school will get priority over those living nearer!
In answer to a question from John Doran, Lib Dem transport spokesperson, the Conservative executive member for transport on Surrey County Council admitted that the council was on target to under-spend its roads budget by nearly £1 million pounds. Mr Munro said "£1 million is about right".
Tory-led Surrey County Council voted today to keep the freeze on youth service recruitment, despite the obvious damage it is causing to youth services throughout Surrey. Liberal Democrat Councillor Diana Smith (Knaphill) put forward a motion calling for an immediate end to the recruitment freeze, put in place in December 2007. But the ruling Tory group voted to keep the status quo.
The 'equal preference' system for school admissions was first used for admissions to Surrey schools this year, September 2007. It means that parents don't have to worry that they will lose a place in the second or third of their preferred schools if the first school is full, just because they did not place those schools first.
When the Conservative administration at County Hall took an axe to its Emergency Planning department as part of a major review, the 11 staff were reduced to just 7 - putting the whole county at risk. All the staff bar one left, leaving the county in an extraordinarily vulnerable state for several months, made worse because a freeze in recruitment blocked the advertising for new staff.
At the Transport Select Committee on 5th December members were given the latest set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the ill fated Surrey Highways Partnership (SHiP). The SHiP is the arrangement whereby Carillion manages road maintenance in the East of the County and Ringway in the West. Although there has been some improvement things are still not good enough.
Surrey County Council Liberal Democrats have called on the ruling Conservative administration to urgently prioritize filling vacancies to front-line services in what group leader Cllr Hazel Watson said was a clear case of the Council "taking its eye off the ball". Nearly two years on from SCC's Business Delivery Review (BDR) which was supposed to result in a "Council fit for purpose" with the right workforce to deliver those services, front-line services are still short on essential staff according to the Liberal Democrats.