Madam,

Before Cllr Owain Williams offers people in Llanbedr who are concerned about the impact of a bypass on their community his rather patronising advice (Face the challenges and adapt if a bypass is built, like we did), he should have done some homework.

The stretch of the A499 around Clynnog Fawr certainly had a bad record for fatal accidents prior to a bypass being built, but Llanbedr does not share this problem.

When Gwynedd Council’s consultants drew up the report that attempted to justify the bypass scheme, they seem to have been unable to find any records of personal injury accidents on the section the A496, including Llanbedr village, that would be bypassed.

Cllr Williams says that the excellent - but now defunct - hotel at Clynnog Fawr was “struggling a long time before the bypass ever arrived”.

Has he never heard of planning blight? What enterprise is going to invest in routine maintenance and improvements, let alone future development that would create jobs, when threatened by a bypass that would inevitably slash its passing trade? Might the owners of such an enterprise not see Cllr Williams’s “long and some time lonely battle” to get a bypass as a campaign to destroy their business, whatever justification there might be for road improvements?

It is all very well advising Llanbedr to “face the challenges and adapt” to a bypass, but why should they have to do so when a bypass is not needed; just an improved access road to an airfield that has been designated an enterprise zone? Increased traffic is certainly not the problem.

Back in the mid 1990s over 200 people who worked at the airfield were travelling through the village twice daily. Does anyone seriously think that those days will return?

Llanbedr is being threatened by an extremely expensive and intrusive bypass scheme which is apparently motivated by a political ruse that would allow Gwynedd Council to obtain Welsh Assembly Government funding for a bypass by calling it an access road to an enterprise zone.

Whatever the justification for bypassing Clynnog Fawr may be, it is still a shocking example of what can happen to a vulnerable rural community, and that is not “trying to make a propaganda point” as Cllr. Williams accuses me of doing. Surely we should learn from what has happened at Clynnog Fawr.

Yours etc

Tony Newbery

Llanbedr.