Hi everyone hope you all had a good holiday this year and were able to get away somewhere nice, its seems a long time since our last meeting, things have been ticking over since our last meeting, I have a lot to report on in our September meeting. I have worked at Sydenham Station for a good part of the summer, we will shortly be able to have people on the site.
There has been a lot of changes within the Alliance Party people have moved on and changed jobs I think the biggest change has been Naomi Long taking up her Westminster seat, Chris Lyttle has now moved on to stand as East Belfast MLA and Laura McNamee selected to replace Naomi Long on Belfast City Council. I really do hope everyone will settle into their new positions and with the moves give the Alliance party a bigger foothold within East Belfast we had a great MLA in Naomi and she will be greatly missed by us all.
Chris Lytle has worked along with Naomi Long for some time now, he always was a very hard worker on the ground for the Alliance Party and was forever present at all meetings from the PACT meetings to our own residents meetings. We wish Chris well as an MLA and hope he gets full support from the people of east East Belfast,I also send our best wishes to Laura McNamee and we look forward to working with her on any council business the residents association may have. This is a time of real change for the residents association in many ways.
Sydenham has come a long way since we first started the residents association fighting for our area to stay as we all know it to be, but as we have seen over the years every site we had to fight over is now up for sale again including 2-4 Station Road, this is not a time for the residents association to just sit back and think it is all over and we no longer need to fight for our area, to be complacent is wrong, as the sites that are up for sale are now being sold with planning permission, we need to make sure that any new planning proposals are again looked at for any changes to the plans where the quantity and dimensions to buildings may have changed and maybe not for the better.
Palmerston Residents Association will be looking for more members, and to expand our area, we also need to have more volunteers in the group to make the association more flexible for us all, we need people who would be willing to sit on different groups such as ACNs, PACT,Belfast City Airport Forum and Neighbourhood Watch, we have seen how important it is to have members on these groups as it enables us to have greater feedback, the need to have members on the PACT panel is vital for the policing of the area.
Palmerston Residents Association are to change the way it works, we need to change to meet the needs of our area, to put emphasis on the change to suit the times we are living in, this is going to be a very exiting time for us all with lots of new ideas on how the association is run and how we face the new challenges that will come in the next few years.
