FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Community Trust future for Cannizaro Park?
Winter 2005
Wimbledon
MP Stephen Hammond has proposed the establishment of a community trust to decide
how Cannizaro and all the other parks in the Borough of Merton are managed.
Conservation groups throughout the borough would act together to preserve and enhance green spaces, with the Friends of Cannizaro Park having a crucial say in the future of Cannizaro itself. Equivalent groups would run each of the other parks.
The community trust would secure funds from Merton Council, organise equipment and labour for maintenance and collect any revenues. It would also have a managing team elected from the individual groups.
Mr Hammond told the Wimbledon Guardian: "In January, when we were having the problems with lack of money to pay for planting in parks, I was chatting to a number of the friends groups about how to make sure there is a long-term strategy and so, every year, we don't have to go through the mill with budget fluctuations. We should be letting local people run their local parks."
Tony Matthews, chairman of the Friends of Cannizaro Park, said: "What we have seen over the years is that cutting maintenance funding has led to a decline in the quality of all the borough's parks. The local authority had already moved in the right direction in getting friends groups involved.
"Now the time is ripe for a community trust. It is simply a question of whether such an organisation will have funds that start off at a reasonable level and are then ring fenced."
