"We didn’t get this right”.  This is the bland understatement put out by the city’s chief commissioner on the shambles that is the up-grade and so-called “beautification” of Cameron Rd Part 1. 

She used the word “scarred”, and expressed regret at the “huge disruption and distress”.  May I say, Ms Tolley, that your words are meaningless PR drivel when the public, through forum after forum, have been shouting this for nigh on two years, and mostly received silence from you and your fellow Commissioners.

It took a report to provoke an offer of some sort of mealy mouthed apology, to the retailers, and the general public, that all this disruption would eventually take us from the current hell of an orange-coned thoroughfare to some sort of future nirvana. 

An owner of a 30-year-old business summed it up succinctly when relocating the business said: “We’ve had a gutsful!” Showing how out of touch this commissioner and her cohorts really are, we had the ultimate PR non statement “we’ve got to learn from this experience”.

I would hazard a guess that Ms Tolley’s “learning” does not include any adverse impact on her remuneration going forward, and nor does it mirror the loss of income and customers that under-siege retailers have had to weather through all this, at times unnecessary, adversity. 

I think this shows Ms Tolley’s mea culpa is driven more by the fact this report was made public, and in fact constitutes more meaningless PR.

Taking a leaf out of the playbook of the recently-ended six-year Labour Government, we are now going to have a “governance group” to tell the Commissioners what is patently obvious to everyone else. Maybe they should step out of their offices and take a walk down Cameron Rd, to see how the real world operates!

Gary Kenny, Bethlehem.