RESIDENTS need roads maintaining and potholes repaired rather than an ambitious ‘wish list’ of projects outlined in town transport development plans, a councillor said.

Wilmslow councillor Don Stockton was speaking at Thursday’s highways and transport meeting where councillors were being asked to approve the plans for Middlewich, Wilmslow, Handforth, Alsager, Congleton and Poynton.

Plans for the other five towns in the borough had been approved in March.

The plans looked at a number of aspects including walking and cycling, bus and rail as well as car.

Cllr Stockton said: “Any money that we have got, and we're told all the time that we have no money, really should be spent on getting the road surfaces right and the potholes filled.

Knutsford Guardian:

Cllr Don Stockton

“[Residents] come to me to tell me there's lots of potholes, they don’t come to tell me that they want a cycle lane that leads from nowhere to nowhere, that doesn't address the junction that the cyclists would be most fearful of when travelling around the roundabout.

“And when I look at these plans, I just see a wish list.”

He reeled off numerous schemes listed on the Wilmslow plan, including measures to improve traffic flow, junction access parking on Lacey Green; parking management measures to improve junction access along Manchester Road, including the Manchester Road/Copperfields junction; improve pedestrian route alongside River Dean; trial tram-train route on the existing rail line between Wilmslow and Manchester Airport.

“I'd be absolutely delighted if any of that happened. I look at it and I see a wish list,” said Cllr Stockton.

“Can we focus this down so that it is not so much a wish list, as some things that we can actually do and preferably maintain our roads?”

Cllr Janet Clowes said: “I think what we do need to reinforce throughout is this is a forward thinking set of documents. Consequently, whilst we have a lot of lovely projects potentially here, it is about managing resident expectation.”

Richard Hibbert, Cheshire East’s head of strategic transport and parking, said the plans had been drawn up so the council had ready-to-go schemes in place and could bid for funding when it became available.

“The vast majority of projects at this stage remain unfunded, it is critical for the authority to have a forward programme in order to elicit funding,” he said.

Councillor Allen Gage asked how much it had cost the council to draw up the plans  ‘because it could potentially be that that money could have been redirected and used to repair what we already have in the first instance’.

Committee chair Craig Browne told him: “Any money that's been invested in officer time to prepare this document couldn't have been used for road repairs because that's a capital spend and officer time is a revenue spend.”

The committee approved the plans which will become part of the council’s policy and programme planning framework for transport.