By Paddy Walsh
LETTERKENNY Tidy Towns is inviting the general public to come along to an open consultation meeting next week to allow them an opportunity to have their say and filter their suggestions and proposals into a three year plan.
“This will give all residents of the town the chance to be directly involved in what we will be doing over the years ahead,” co-chairperson, Gerard McCormick pointed out.
The local Tidy Towns committee has appointed Billy Flynn – himself a senior Tidy Towns judge – from Flynn Furney Environmental Consultants based in Clones, County Monaghan as a consultant in the process.
“He’s fairly familiar with the town and he came and met us as a group and is now reaching out to all the stakeholders that we work with within Tidy Towns, such as schools, the county council and all the local authority people and businesses, all the strands that we would touch base with over the year,” Gerard added.
“He wants us to create an open consultation forum and the Mount Errigal Hotel has very kindly agreed to host the meeting.”
That meeting is scheduled to take place next Thursday (March 21) and will run for approximately an hour from 7.30pm.
“We’re inviting a cross section of the local community to come along to the meeting and have their say and tell us what we should be concentrating on.
“Billy will then filter that into the information that he knows we should be doing and what we currently are doing, what we have in the pipeline and what the public say.
“And he’ll marry all that into the three year plan that we will work on bit by bit.”
Added the co-chairperson: “An effective and realistic Tidy Towns plan is now a requirement for any high-scoring Tidy Towns group to make progress in the competition.”
Pointing out that Letterkenny Tidy Towns has been a “national leader in this extremely competitive movement” while continuing to be among the top-ranked towns in Ireland, Mr McCormick stated: “We want to make our place on the leader-board count for Letterkenny and for the people of the town.
“We invite you to come along and tell us what you think we should be doing for our town and its residents.”
Among the projects they are working on, the local Tidy Towns committee – it boasts sixteen members – has been involved in a bio-diversity plan, the first part of which incorporates Sentry Hill, the Famine Garden, and Linear Park in Ballyraine.
“We’ve been given recommendations of how we can make those three areas more bio-diversity friendly.
“This will be the start of a process where we will survey other areas and eventually create a bio-diversity corridor through the town,” said the co-chairperson.
Receive quality journalism wherever you are, on any device. Keep up to date from the comfort of your own home with a digital subscription.
Any time | Any place | Anywhere
SUBSCRIBE TO CURRENT EDITION TODAY
and get access to our archive editions dating back to 2007(CLICK ON THE TITLE BELOW TO SUBSCRIBE)