News from the Parish Council

I attended today’s Special Acol Parish Council meeting called, to discuss adoption of the draft Acol Highways Improvement Plan (HIP) and inclusion of the requirement to reduce the speed limit on our village roads to 20 mph.

Councillor Wendy Winpenny had attended a recent Thanet Area Committee meeting, where it was evident that every Thanet village has the same requirement. An issue is that KCC costings for the implementation of such schemes are proving quite high, which is especially a problem for small communities, like ours, which have correspondingly small budgets, and where any additional funding provision would have to come from significant local Council Tax increases. It was therefore agreed that a further joint meeting would be arranged to consider overall costs once every Parish Council has adopted the required measures in their HIPs.

Acol PC agreed to formally adopt its draft HIP (on the Acol Parish Council website), including the requirement for a 20 mph speed limit on village roads at its next meeting, which will be at 11 am on Monday 26th September.

It was further agreed that all future Acol PC meetings will include a standing item on “Highways” to facilitate discussion of the Highways Improvement Plan and related matters, such as speed humps, Speedwatch, highway weight restrictions and speed limits.

At its next meeting the PC will also consider a proposal to implement Auto Speedwatch in place of the speed warning sign that was formerly in place on Minster Road and which has proven uneconomical to replace.