Result of last night's town poll: 870 people saying keep the library and youth centre facilities in town and just 59 saying move them.

Blimey - out of 14,000 people and is that not less than those that filled in the survey?

It's probable Melksham townspeople feel their voice is just never going to be heard anyway. Or they may be sticking to their protest of not using the car parks and staying away from town. Or they may have seen the "High Street Closed" signs and turned back. Or they might feel Wiltshire Council made this decision more than six months ago and will be sticking to it come hell or high water, so why bother? Councillor Jonathan Seed has certainly made it abundantly clear that it's his way or nothing. On his online bio http://tinyurl.com/3g73bfn he states he is "acutely aware of the pressures put on local businesses and local people by local government" and I guess this means he plays the political game well. (He's the Councillor that represents Seend but lives in Chittoe Heath, Broham, which is really part of Devizes, not Melksham, and just happens to be close to his desired site.)

Sadly I'm just cynical enough to believe that the timing of the Town Poll - 4pm to 9pm - was intentionally set that way to disenfranchise the old folk who wanted to vote. I've run polling stations locally for 25 years and know from experience that the older population come out between 10am and lunchtime, when their entertainment / luncheon clubs / trips to the post office tend to happen. Proud to say my elderly Mum's neighbours drove her up there to vote (she's registered blind and in her mid 80s so it was quite an effort) but, she's very much in the minority. If the poll had been open 10am to 7pm for instance I think there would have been a much bigger turn out.

At the end of the day, you have to remember that approximately only 2000 signed the petition to keep the library in the first place and they were not just from Melksham Town so would have been from a greater population than 14000 electorate. Maybe other people feel strongly about having new sporting facilities.

Pam, thanks for that - I stand corrected! At the end of the day though I'm with Lisa - community facilities should be located at the heart of the community. Imagine what a fuss Bowerhill residents would kick up if they were forced to share Gastard Village Hall just because it saved the council money in the short term.

The need for transport out to Melksham Oak - not to just rely on the car - has been acknowledged should the Campus be built there. But the details are vague, because this is still in the planning stage, and to me some of the things that have been suggested for such transport are optimistic based on current experience. It's been suggested that the current two buses an hour from the town centre could provide a half hourly service, and they could do so for long hours and 7 days a week if there was demand ... but at the same time, the current two buses an hour run about 3 minutes apart and there's a 57 minute gap, and noone has been able to get them altered to be sensibly (as far as customers are concerned) retimed to make the gap a regular 30 minutes ... so if this improvement's not been achieved yet, how will it be magiced to happen for the future? Then you have the current question make over the Sunday Evening 272 service - seems odd to say "we'll be providing transport in 2013" yet cutting out that transport in 2011, doesn't it? There's also the very interesting question of the cost of providing bus services to Melksham Oak; you may hear people say "it would be a commercial service", but even commercial bus services in Wiltshire (unlike train services) are largely paid for by the local taxpayer, via bus passes issued to seniors. If 35 people an hour go out to the library at the campus on an average 8 hour day, I estimate that the bus pass payments from Wiltshire Council to the bus operators will be over 200,000 per year. Put it another way - that's 6 million pounds at current values through the period that the campus is being evaluated over. And that's 6 million I've not seen in anyone's figures. Of course, the figure could turn out to be lower (which would indicate a failure of the campus to attract the customers it's being built for), or it could turn out to be higher (which would fall on the council tax payer, or lead to withdrawl of the service / limitation by overcrowding, infrequency of service, provision of service at the wrong times, lack of connection and so on).