St Mark’s Road residents left frustrated after resurfacing fiasco

Residents at the bottom of St Mark’s Road were looking forward to their road finally being resurfaced (photo above before) on Monday this week however the work had to be abandoned due to cars being left on the road and low hanging trees.

Tim Ferguson, resident of St Mark’s Road said, “The road started to get really bad 3 years with long deep trenches and we’ve been in contact with MP Freddie van Mierlo and Henley’s County Councillor Stefan Gawrysiak for a long time. It was only after we emailed Councillor Liz Leffman, OCC Cabinet Member for Highways Construction and Repair a few months ago that we finally got some action.”

Another resident wrote to the Council pointing out the state of the road saying, “There are now deep craters and furrows in places, considerable loose aggregate and a lot of dust being generated by passing traffic.”

On Friday (4 September) notices were put on cars to say that the work was being carried out but these did not include a date of the work.  Signs then appeared at the top and bottom of the road with handwritten dates on.  The two signs however had different number of days the work would take.

On Monday (7 September) workman turned up to start the job.  Tim said, “There was a car left that we had identified had been parked for 6-7 weeks under a tree and we contacted the police about it and they found the owner before the work started.  On Monday morning, 6 cars were still left. We found the owners of 3 of the cars via posts on Facebook which left 3 cars by the time they started. The workman started sweeping the road around the 3 cars and said they would try and get the machine under the trees.  We then complained to the Councillor Leffmann and within an hour they were taking the cones away.  They said the job has been abandoned because of the parked cars and overhanging trees. OCC have the authority to remove cars, but they didn’t in this instance.”

St Mark’s Road is used by many commuters to park for work all day to avoid car-parking costs, so the cars left were probably theirs.  Tim said, “There should have been some foresight ahead of the work.  They should have come and looked at the street and could have avoided all those problems, now they have compounded them. We don’t know when they are coming back, they have just filled in the trenches and when we asked them to leave the cones to stop people parking they told me that they couldn’t because the cones cost them money.  This whole fiasco is a waste of our taxpayers’ money and it is very frustrating. I wrote to Cllr Leffmann and got a response to say they are looking into it.  It fills me with doom.”

Henley’s County Councillor Stefan Gawrysiak has been asked to look into this.