Are we becoming second class citizens in our own city?

Two recent events have got me thinking so. The first is the proposal to demolish the Parliament Street fountain, that very useful central easy-to-find meeting place with plenty of seats in case you have to wait a bit. The second is the controversy over charging for entry to York Art Gallery.

Make It York wants to remove the fountain to make more room for festivals to please tourists and suggests Shambles Market food area as an alternative meeting place, on the grounds that on the continent, markets are a common meeting place.

As someone who has lived and worked in three different European countries, my reaction is "Pull the other one."

Markets in European towns and villages tend to be in the only open area big enough to house them, namely the central square, which often has a memorial, a statue or a plague column. So the favoured meeting place is generally not described as "at the market" even though stalls are all around it, but "at the memorial/the statue/the plague column" all of which are easy to find and are a single point, unlike a market, which can be spread over a wide area.

Shambles Market food area on the other hand, is not easy to find, though the food and drink stalls would come in handy as I while away the hours waiting for my friends to find it tucked away behind all the other stalls in the bit between the bottom of Shambles and the back of Marks and Spencer.

Once there, you feel cut off from the rest of the city centre. If it were a quiet day I would want to be waiting in somewhere more populated.

No, I'll not be meeting my friends in Shambles Market should the fountain disappear. I have yet to work out where I will be meeting them, but that's not a matter that will particularly concern Make It York, whose priority is to attract people to come to York, rather than the needs of those already living here.

Make It York is one of a growing number of organisations that are taking over tasks formerly carried out by the city council in these days of austerity.

City councillors have to give a very high priority to the needs of current residents, because if they don't the local electorate will boot them out at the first available election. But the new organisations don't face elections and have different priorities.

Take York Museums Trust, now in charge of Yorkshire Museum, Castle Museum and York Art Gallery, all of which provide educational and leisure services to local residents and all of which were founded to educate and entertain local residents.

The Trust's priority is to maintain all three as going concerns, not the needs of local residents. They see the throngs of tourists filling our streets as legitimate sources of funds, so quite naturally, they want all three to appeal to people from all over the world. The New York Times ran a piece recently on the gallery's ceramics collection.

Free admission for local residents means lost income for it, so the Trust is understandably happy to add them to the list of those it charges as much it thinks it can get them to pay.

Charge the tourists, yes, but not us locals. Why should we have to pay for the privilege of attending our city's museum and gallery just because we happen to live in a city popular with tourists.

The threat of demolition hanging over Parliament Street fountain and the York Art Gallery entrance fees won't be alone. Watch out for more ways in which local residents will be pushed down the priority list in these days of austerity.