Pressure on open spaces and the increasingly concentrated housing developments were adding to social stress, the United Bermuda Party?s Kenneth Bascome warned in the Senate this week.

Sen. Bascome said open spaces helped to maintain people?s sanity.

?As a person who had the privilege of operating a facility in a park, I can tell you more and more pressure is being put on open spaces,? Sen. Bascome said. ?As we look about Bermuda we see all stresses, it affects behaviour patterns.?

He said as homes moved closer together, tolerance levels decreased.

Noise pollution was also a problem, he said. People were finding it difficult to find anywhere on the Island where they were not bombarded by noise.

?You can?t sit off at the shore without someone playing a ghetto-blaster, making you partake of what he wants to listen to,? he said.

Motorcycles were no longer being tested for noise because the noise chamber at TCD was broken, but Sen. Bascome said that was a very poor excuse.

And he said many people did not know how to object to developments in their neighbourhoods.

The Ministry of the Environment should better educate people about how to object before the bulldozers reached their neighbourhoods, he added.

He said residents in St. George?s were also concerned about sewage outflow in the Old Town. Given the number of hotels being contemplated over the next five years, sewage treatment plants throughout the Island are needed, Sen. Bascome argued.

?We are leaking sewage on some of the most scenic and popular beaches in the world,? he added.