Help Our Community with Money

The Long Leys Residents’ Association is asking the community for urgent help in two money related areas:

• Please Donate Money to the Stop Veolia Legal & Campaign Fund
• Finding a Volunteer Assistant Treasurer for the LLRA

Please Donate Money to Stop Veolia Legal & Campaign Fund

Our community deserves to have proper legal representation at the upcoming public inquiry on the Veolia waste transfer station development. The Stop Veolia Action Group has launched a fundraising campaign to raise £10,000 towards this. The LLRA have agreed to provide the banking and accounting facilities for this fundraising and to provide scrutiny to ensure that no money is wasted.
See justgiving.com/crowdfunding/stopveoliainlincoln for more information and to make a donation. If you don’t have access to a computer then donations can also be made by cheque (Payable to Long Leys Residents Association and marked Stop Veolia on the back). Just email LLRA@long-leys.org and one of the committee will be in touch to collect it from you.

This money will be used to pay for:

• Legal advice to assess our submissions to the Planning Inspectorate
  (Initial responses are due by 4th October. We need legal advice in early September)
• Legal representation at the public inquiry (dates to be announced in the next few weeks)
• Leaflets and hall hire for general communication with residents

We get asked two questions about the Legal & Campaign Fund

1. Shouldn’t the council be doing this?
2. Hasn’t the LLRA got lots of money?
NO is the simple answer to both questions.

1. County Council planning are there to ensure the planning and appeal processes are fair and followed correctly for all parties. They will defend their original refusal grounds but will not be there to fight tooth and nail to stop this on our behalf. Our elected representatives are working hard to ensure that our voice is heard but if the Long Leys Community wants to stop the Veolia development we need to fight this ourselves with a barrister who is on our side and no-one else’s. Not just sit back and hope the council will make the problem go away.

2. Between the LLRA and Stop Veolia we have about one hundred and thirty seven pound …yes £137.56! Everything done on the previous Stop Veolia campaign was paid for by kind-hearted individuals dipping into their own pockets (and giving hundreds of hours of their own time by the way). The recent leaflet about the September public meeting that came through your door was paid for by individuals out of their own pockets (and delivered by unpaid volunteers). Now they need the rest of the community to get behind them. Don’t sit back and watch Veolia win.

Please don’t get confused over the “section 106 money” that has been talked about over the last year. This money sits in the County Council’s bank account and it can only be spent on “community capital projects” which means absolutely none of it can be spent fighting Veolia (or helping run the LLRA itself with printing or a website). It can be spent over the next seven years so now is not the time to debate this in detail; sadly people in our community are spending all their spare time preparing to defend against Veolia rather than planning how things can be improved in the longer term. We have lots of ideas but no time; let’s beat Veolia and then build a better community.

Finding a Volunteer Assistant Treasurer for the LLRA

We need a volunteer assistant Treasurer who can provide monthly reports to Stop Veolia Legal & Campaign Fund trustees as well as helping to steer the LLRA towards charitable status and handling HMRC queries on the fundraising. If you would like to help then please let us know by emailing us at LLRA@long-leys.org.