bluesince76
Well-Known Member
You're so wrong it's funny. How many of the meetings about this were you in?Absolutely untrue, Burnham was suddenly against a charging CAZ when his original scheme was slapped down. The original huge scheme was his idea, if you've followed it closely instead of listening to his hubris. He was pressurised to admit on one of his weekly chats with Mike Sweeney, who couldn't quite run cover for him.
He was all for charging on the 493 sq miles, but suddenly wanted it to be free on the smaller suggested scheme. It was politically neccessary for him in the run up to local elections. Two of the boroughs (originally three) were never required to have any CAZ zone, but jumped straight into his cash generating scheme. One Borough, Bolton, who never wanted to be part of it were forced to join by legal threats.
A charging CAZ was the only thing that could be shown to make the level of change legally required in the timescale from 100+ options looked at. Even that wouldn't have fixed it due to the motorway network, but that was a government rather than local issue and was therefore apparently ok.
I'll leave it at that as you're not going to change your mind.