There has been a partial account of Blaenhonddan Council’s decision to cease to operate Caewern community hall. It is unfortunate that neither the Guardian nor the Evening Post were able to send a reporter to the public meeting last Monday at which the issues were addressed. That meeting listened to the protests from the two users of the hall who felt that the six weeks notice given was insufficient for them to make other arrangements, and that, since the council’s accounting year ran until April, the existing precept should take account of running costs until then.

Cllr. Peters (Plaid Cymru) successfully moved suspension of standing orders so that an amendment could be made to the original decision. The hall will now stay open until April. My own view is that the matter of the precept is somewhat irrelevant, and, though December 31st was a tight deadline, a further month should have been sufficient.

Let’s state the facts on which the decision was made, since they rather got lost in the general furore last Monday.

Caewern community centre is less than a kilometre away from a more spacious, purpose-built, 21st-century centre, the Owain Glyndwr.

It requires work to bring it up to modern safety standards. The cost of this work is not yet known, but it will be of the order of thousands of pounds.

In 2007/8, it cost over £1200 per month (in rates, utilities, maintenance, cleaning materials and caretaker wages) to run. The receipts were less than £170 per month on average.

We therefore propose in the short term to close the centre, saving on the running costs and hopefully increasing the revenue of the Owain Glyndwr, which is also running at a loss. We are giving the two groups, who currently use the centre regularly, a few months to decide whether to relocate to the Owain Glyndwr on the same terms, or to make other arrangements.

In the long term, we are looking to give up the lease on the centre to the owners, Neath Port Talbot County Borough. Although we cannot force a break in the contract until 2011, under the terms of the lease, we are seeking to negotiate an end to the lease by mutual agreement.

We accept that the primary purpose of such halls is to provide a service to the community, not to make a profit. However, we must seek to make best use of the council taxpayers’ money while maintaining that service.

The only reason for holding in camera the meeting which decided on the closure was because confidential staff matters were involved.

I am not in the business of closing centres for the sake of it. Each facility must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. This will involve not only economies, but also encouraging their use to maximise their potential.

The Ramblers’ Association has a Downing Street petition here which is self-explanatory. I would only add that not only paths enjoyed by long-distance walkers are affected. Habitual footpaths, such as those taken as a short cut by ordinary members of the public and which may be taken for granted, are liable to be lost.

I know that Cadoxton’s footpaths have already been defined and are preserved by good use.  However, we can help others save their habitual rights-of-way from being lost.

The Ramblers’ Association organised a useful training day at Llandarcy today. As well as grounding in basic footpath law, we had a presentation on the Wales Coastal Path.

Some long-held erroneous beliefs were dispelled, while there was reassurance that the law was stronger than I assumed. However, it has yet to be tested in some cases.

Another gratifying message was that our county borough is among the more progressive authorities in respect of footpaths. Neath Port Talbot is cooperating over the missing sections of the coastal path, though there are some tricky problems to solve.

A major benefit of events like this is the opportunity to meet the keen walkers who use our footpaths, as well as people from other communities in South Wales. Two ramblers from Llanelli brought the good news that Carmarthenshire county council are reconsidering their decision to abandon St Illtyd’s Way, which might encourage our environment people to maintain the eastern section down to Margam.

An application has been made to upgrade footpath26 (shown alongside on map copied from Blaenhonddan community council’s guide to public rights of way) to a bridleway.

If anyone has any comments, could they send them to me, or to the Head of Legal Services of the City of Swansea who is coordinating, by 7th December.

I shall be holding my regular monthly councillor surgery from 10 a.m. to mid-day this coming Saturday, 25th October, in the small hall of Cadoxton community centre.

South Wales West AM, Liberal Democrat Peter Black, has made a significant speech to the Council for Wales of Voluntary Youth Services.

Was it really that bad? readers of the Neath Guardian may ask. Well, yes, unfortunately it was. The Guardian’s reporting on this, and on the other items relating to Blaenhonddan in this week’s edition, is accurate so far as I can recall. One can only hope that, having got the party-political and personal point-scoring in the first meeting after the AGM out of the way, we can concentrate on working for the good of the community, rather than our respective political parties.

The report of my comments on Cllr. Matthews’ motion was also accurate. I also said that, if his motion did actually become law, parish and town councils in many parts of England would collapse. What I was tempted to add was that a few Labour councillors might be disbarred if a residents-only rule were applied to the county borough council!

On the positive side, I managed to get appointed to the Open Spaces Committee of the council. Sadly, for reasons which were not entirely clear to me, Peter Jutsum, Labour fellow-representative from Cadoxton, had not been elected to it. I can only hope that I can achieve half of what Peter has done for the ward’s footpaths and open spaces in the last four years. Fortunately, Mike Richards, whose name is mentioned in the same breath as Peter’s, will continue.

I am flattered by J.Powell’s description of me as “leader of Blaenhonddan council”, in her letter to this week’s “Neath Guardian”, but have to correct her - I am the mere ward councillor on the county borough council. I don’t recall a letter of mine being published on May 7th, either.

I do recall making the comments about hooligans - and I hasten to add that these were stated to be incomers, not locals - to the assistant editor of the “Guardian” in an interview on election night. These remarks were reported in the May 7th issue, and I stand by them, in that I was relaying problems which were reported to me by constituents. Not every problem in Cadoxton affects all the ward.

At their first monthly meeting after the May 1st elections, Neath and Port Talbot Liberal Democrats welcomed Joanne Foster, the new Chief Executive of Welsh Liberal Democrats. There were congratulations for John Warman (Cimla) and Keith Davies (Coedffranc North), who retained their seats, and for new councillors Des Sparkes (Cimla) and Frank Little (Cadoxton).

It was felt that the strengthened Liberal Democrat group (now third-largest on the council) would increase its effectiveness out of proportion to the increase in its numbers.

The meeting resolved to campaign on behalf of the people of Baglan, who had been denied a democratic choice at the election, after the last-minute defection of two Ratepayer candidates to the Labour party.

It was reported that the ruling Labour group on Neath Port Talbot council had voted against offering chairs of any scrutiny committee to opposition councillors. In view of the fact that LibDem-led Swansea had proposed that the Labour opposition should have the choice of Swansea’s scrutiny chairs, and a similar move in Ceredigion, Neath Port Talbot’s obduracy was condemned as undemocratic.