The only surprise regarding the Brisbane St road being open to traffic fiasco, and the resulting retailers’ pain, is that someone hasn’t yet been seriously injured or worst still, killed.

Pre-festival I wrote about this potentially very dangerous issue several times and now I watch kids playing Russian roulette with B-doubles and drunken festival- goers actually lying down in the middle of this busy intersection. 

If this year’s festival actually runs its course without a major incident then that will be the big surprise!

When I look at this year’s layout I can see some semblance of logic in what council are trying to achieve this time around. 

The problem was always gross lack of consultation with those to be affected – Peel St retailers –  closely followed by a partial back- flip due to that lack of foresight and all for the wrong stated reasons.

Classic bureaucracy hard at work treating us like mushrooms while  spending our money.

Now our intrepid country music festival leaders will be able to point at the fact that the western end of Peel St was in fact an entertainment dead zone (no surprise there) for the 2015 event and therefore they will be completely justified in opening it up to traffic for the 2016 event. 

Bad luck to those affected businesses.

So, instead of planning out a reorganisation and consolidation of the festival events and then selling that to us, the Tamworth ratepayers 

(who pay for this event) well in advance, John decided to try to get it done by stealth, failed and what we ended up with is this very dangerous half-arsed situation that blind, deaf and dumb Freddy could have foreseen.

Bruce Read

Tamworth