Kendal Town Councillors have been getting a sneak preview of the programme for this year’s Mintfest, now only two weeks away. As a newcomer to the event, I’m amazed at what’s on offer. The organisers claim:

In just over 2 weeks’ time Kendal will be hosting one of Europe’s leading street arts festivals – Mintfest. Mintfest is unquestionably Cumbria’s leading international festival in terms of its artists/performers, its audiences, its industry profile (it is now the UK’s showcase festival which has moved from Manchester to Kendal this year) and its reputation within the street arts field.

From 29 August there will be more than 150 artists in the Town with more than a third from Europe and further afield and there will be around 100+ international promoters, directors and professionals from the street arts and festivals field.

The key is Mintfest offers “great art for everyone” and it is the envy of many towns and cities across the UK and after only 4 years!

After looking at the web page here, and downloading the programme from here, I’m inclined to agree that this looks like an extraordinary event in the making.

And we thought that moving away from Edinburgh meant the end of festivals for us…

Tuesday this week saw the beginning of the month double bill of Planning Committee followed by the full meeting of Kendal Town Council. Planning Committee excelled itself by recommending all the applications for approval, which meant we finished in time for the new format ‘prayers’ / ‘thought for the evening’ session as agreed last month. Possibly it was the novelty value, but I counted 13 councillors who took the trouble to arrive five minutes early to hear the Deputy Mayor give us a ‘thought for the evening’.

The main Council Meeting had a presentation on future plans for Kendal Museum, which is looking for funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to give the Museum a complete makeover. There was also a request to make a currently unused building on the site available to The Mountain Film Company, who run the mountain film competition during the the Kendal Mountain Festival. The Town Council has an interest, as councillors are also ex-officio trustees of the charity which owns the site.

By the end of the meeting I was interested to discover that councillors are ex-officio trustees of a total of three local charities: Dowker Bindloss, Schools of Science and Art, and the Allen Institute and Museum. In most cases I would expect the aims of these charities would coincide with those of the Council, but it will be interesting to see how councillors manage to juggle their different hats should a conflict of interest arise.

One final note on the environment front – the Council has officially replied to the SLDC’s Air Quality Progress Report 2010. Having read the report and the ‘Action Plan’, I personally feel that the words ‘Progress’ and ‘Action’ are wildly optimistic. Take this glorious non-sequitur issued in March and then repeated in June:

South Lakeland District Council (SLDC) has launched a consultation with affected residents on whether the council should widen the existing Air Quality Management Area (AQMA).

The existing area currently includes Lowther Street but recent monitoring shows targets for Nitrogen Dioxide levels will not be met in the street or in traffic hotspots across the town.
…
By including an enlarged area it’s hoped levels of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) from traffic will be reduced making our air cleaner and healthier.

My emphasis – it’s good to see the quality of the air we breathe is in safe hands.

Two contrasting views this week of what “the environment” can mean. The Town Council has members on various organisations in the town. Three of the councillors (a record number) expressed an interest in South Lakes Action on Climate Change / Towards Transition (SLACC/TT) – the group who successfully gained Transition Town status for Kendal this year. On Tuesday we met up with Chris Rowley of SLACC/TT to discuss how we could work together. Last night we had another meeting, this time with Clare Feeney-Johnson, who holds the Environment and Sustainability Portfolio on South Lakes District Council, to see how this link could fit into the wider ‘environment’ activities in local government.

It would be easy to see this as the two extremes of the green agenda. SLACC/TT worries about the two life / civilisation threatening issues of climate change and peak oil; SLDC worries about recycling plastics and card from remote Cumbrian farms and villages – and litter (especially dog poo). There are of course areas of overlap – Clare had just visited an eco-school, which I’m sure SLACC/TT would endorse equally enthusiastically.

Pressure groups exist to form public opinion, and then elected bodies respond to the wishes of their constituents. Pressure groups will of course try to short-circuit the process and influence the elected bodies directly, and it is arguable that elected representatives have a leadership role too. However, after knocking on lots of doors during the recent election campaign, I did hear a lot about dog poo, but very little about climate change. The challenge for councillors who share SLACC/TT’s convictions will be to help them get the message across to ordinary Kendalians.

Interesting debate at the Planning Committee tonight. We were considering a planning application for works at a house in the conservation area in Kendal, to replace an existing porch / conservatory of little merit with a new design.

The owner and the architect had obviously studied the Green Building Bible and taken it to heart. From a “green” perspective the new design had everything, from its re-used brickwork, its low carbon footprint timber, its Thermafleece (local sheeps’ wool) insulation, its use of natural daylight, to its flat sedum roof. The porch was literally in the back garden of the property, and not visible from any public road. The ideal place you might think to experiment with how well “green” building could be blended with a traditional Kendal property.

However, on the other side stood the barrier of being in a conservation area, where there is a rigid policy of not just replacing like with like, but even replacing like with original to correct “mistakes” in the past. For example, people living in property with uPVC windows will not be given permission to replace them with uPVC, if the property traditionally had timber windows.

There was a lively debate, which came to a vote – quite unusual. For the record, the conservationist line won, and the application was recommended for refusal when it comes in front of SLDC. Kendal may be officially a Transition Town, but the transition to green building faces an uphill struggle.

I seemed to spend all of Tuesday walking to and from the town centre on Council business. In the morning there was a briefing for new councillors on the role of Local Area Partnerships (LAPs). Dilligent readers may remember I spent Monday evening at a meeting of the Neighbourhood Forum, a body set up to promote joined up working between the three tiers of local government and encourage participation by local people. So, I was interested to hear that LAPs were set up to promote joined up working between the three tiers of local government and encourage participation by local people. Hmm. However, they too have a budget, so we need to ensure Kendal folks get their share.

Tuesday evening saw a training session for new councillors on the Code of Conduct under which we operate. Maybe we are supposed to be so overwhelmed with the funds at the Councils’ disposal that we may be tempted to pour it into the laps of friends and family (or should that be LAPs?). I’m still trying to get my head round the difference between personal and prejudicial interests. Maybe if I just try to be open and honest and do the best for the general good of the ward and Kendal as a whole – that should be enough.

During the Mayor’s Sunday Service, Kendal’s new Mayor asked for the Parable of the Good Samaritan to be read. This must be the most famous answer ever to the question “Who is my neighbour?”

So it was with some interest that I went along to a meeting of the Kendal Neighbourhood Forum, a forum run by Cumbria County Council, the highest of the three levels of local government in this town. I am by instinct deeply suspicious of the flood of ‘consultation initiatives’ which have been launched in the UK – basically, the more pig-headed the government, the more they have wanted to ‘consult’ to convince people that they know best.

This Forum had a few presentations from various bodies, but it became apparent that the main reason why most people were there was the last item on the agenda. The Forum has real money to dish out to local community bodies, who had two minutes to pitch for funding. It was a bit like Dragons’ Den, but the dragons’ fires had been extinguished and their teeth removed. Various play groups, sports clubs, etc had their say and were granted amounts of between five hundred and a thousand pounds to help boost their existing fundraising for projects. As there was no restriction on the available pot, all the requests were duly approved by common acclaim.

It’s easy to be cynical about this. The seven grand or so dispensed tonight is not going to make much of a hole in Cumbria’s annual budget of around 350 million. The audience in the room were not likely to turn down requests. Putting all that to one side, it is true that the funds will make a difference to the community groups who receive them, and these groups are exactly the people the councils need to encourage if we are to build a greater ‘civic society’ in Kendal (not to confused with the Kendal Civic Society, who were co-incidentally one of the recipients of tonight’s largesse). In their various ways, these groups are indeed trying to be Good Samaritans. If this is one way they can extract money from ‘the system’ to help them, then good luck to them.

I went along to the opening of a fascinating little exhibition at Kendal Library this morning. Kendal is an ancient wool town – the town’s motto is Pannus mihi Panis (Wool is my Bread) – and a sample book dating back to 1769 somehow survived the centuries to become one of the town’s treasures. This Kendal Pattern Book is now on display with interpretative panels about the wool industry, plus a modern recreation of the patterns by the Lancs and Lakes Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers.

I asked the Guild’s Chair why the modern editions were twice the size of the originals. She told me that it was no longer possible to source linen thread as fine as that produced in 1769. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

If you’re visiting the Lake District this summer, do pop in – it’s free.