A message from Cllr Kevin Guy, Leader of Bath & North East Somerset Council
Our picture this week is a little different than usual. It was taken when I had the pleasure last Friday of visiting the Bath BMX Club track at Odd Down, where riders are enjoying the first improvements in a £146k project to enhance the facility.
Bath & North East Somerset Council has allocated £100k from the Bath Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) to the Bath BMX Club project, alongside an additional £40k from developer contributions, with the club contributing the remaining £6k.
New safety gates and railings, staging pens and a tarmac road are among the improvements that have already been completed at the club following the funding award.
These are excellent improvements to the amazing community facility that Bath BMX Club provides, with much more to come. I hope more residents will be encouraged to join regular users of the track and give this exciting sport a try. It’s so important that a wide variety of leisure facilities are on offer across the district to enable more people to take part in physical activity and I’m delighted that the council has been able to support this popular club.
Staying with funding, we’re making excellent progress in securing investing to tackle the climate and ecological emergency. Bath Sports & Leisure Centre is set to benefit from energy saving measures with the installation of rooftop solar photo voltaic (PV) panels following a successful bid by the council which has seen £173,166 from Phase II (Capital) of the government’s Swimming Pool Support Fund (SPSF), which funds capital investment to improve the energy efficiency of public facilities with pools.
This comes in addition to the more than £2m of investment over the next five years in capital schemes under the Climate Emergency and Sustainable Transport portfolio - agreed as part of the budget we set in February. This will support renewable energy schemes, active travel, and nature recovery projects – including Bathscape, Waterspace Connected and Somer Valley Rediscovered - to secure better access for people to local nature. In addition, a further £18.953m of schemes is in the pipeline, including further renewable energy projects, more tree planting and an ecology centre.
Have a good weekend.
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