| Join the Green Party and you'll receive our local quarterly newsletter, as well as invitations to Green Events. You'll be invited to attend meetings, join our discussion list, vote on issues, and contribute to our campaigns and policies for North Devon. |
The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
Previous entries
|
8th February '09
I am not an accountant so a recent meeting of the Policy Committee of Torridge which dealt with budget issues was heavy going. Simply expressed the district council estimates it will have £2.5 million available for projects though some £1.4 million of this depends on sales of assets etc – and only £200,000 has come in at the moment. We also heard that the council owes some £1.5 million and is paying this off at 4% per annum. Apparently a certain proportion of this was inherited from the old borough and rural district councils when they were taken over in 1974! Given these figures the committee is to recommend a zero increase in council tax to the Full Council. Councillor Steve Clarke was passionately against this arguing that we would be ‘going back to the dark old days of pre-2003’ when we foolishly kept council house rents low and thus had no funds to do anything with Steve making the point that by not matching the Devon county council rise of 2.9% we would only be ‘disadvantaging our communities’. He wanted us to reconsider ‘this suicidal attempt to set a zero council tax’. The proposal to seek such a rate, however, was proposed by James Morrish and seconded by Barry Parsons with the vote being 8 in favour with just 1 against.
I would add that the ‘projects’ referred to above were recently prioritised by council members following various public surveys including one that saw 2500 letters being sent out to selected households in the district – with some 1298 responses being generated – an extremely good reply rate. The raw results of these surveys were interesting with Health Services and Level of Crime (neither of which Torridge deal with of course) scoring highest in terms of importance. As to factors which needed improving then Road/Pavement repairs scored highest followed by Wage Levels and the rather bizarre category Teenagers. After I asked how young people might be improved I was told that owing to a technical glitch this should have read Facilities for Teenagers – which I suspect is a more achievable target!
Published and promoted by and on behalf of the North Devon Green Party, of 1 Taw View Terrace, Bishops Tawton, EX32 0AW
PLEASE NOTE: Not all of the material presented on this site is necessarily Green Party Policy or endorsed by The Green Party.