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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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19th Oct '08
Bideford town council rarely holds meetings outside of its normal sequence but we recently convened in an Extraordinary Meeting to discuss our position on which assets currently owned by Torridge and Devon county council we would like to obtain if a new Unitary council comes into being. The discussion was desultory at first but members were galvanised by Roger Vanstone who thought it would be marvellous to buy some of them but wondered where the money would come from – and then mused how we would maintain an undertaking like Victoria Park as it would entail employing more staff and shouldering some hefty maintenance costs? His view was echoed by Steve Clarke who had read Torridge’s ‘Draft Community Transfer Protocol’ (the guide to how to obtain Torridge’s assets) and strongly queried how we could fulfil the 15 criteria that had to be met by anyone seeking to get hold of an asset. David Ratcliff joined in at this point saying that those local assets given to Torridge by the old Borough council (for nothing) in the last shake-up of local government in 1974 should be given back to us for the same price – which didn’t actually answer councillor Vanstone’s point but got a lot of support around the table. He went on to attack James Morrish, the Leader of Torridge, who at a meeting with local Mayors to discuss assets, promised that Holsworthy would be a ‘test case’ which Bideford might like to follow – yet nothing has happened there for us to copy! David Fulford warned that the town council receives so small a portion of the council tax that unless we got more we couldn’t afford to take anything over and he wanted us to flag this up now – even though, as I pointed out, nothing we said could be binding on a new Unitary council. Andy Powell suggested we needed to express an ‘interest’ in certain properties to kick start the process. At this point our town clerk reported that according to his research we could be given back our pre-1974 assets for free - as has happened elsewhere. I therefore proposed we ask first for the Town Hall as it would seem rather odd to have a town council meeting anywhere except there – and if Torridge try to sell it to us we could use some of the £200,000 Devon county are allegedly going to give the new Community Boards to buy it (though ‘our’ £200,000 is split between us, Northam and a lot of other parishes stretching from Instow to Welcombe owing to the stupidity of the county council). Sadly, any cash paid to Torridge would automatically pass to the new Unitary authority – who could quite easily spend it in South Devon – so we don’t want to pay anything if we can help it. After a lot more discussion we accepted a proposal from Andy Powell to ask for the free transfer of assets to the town council from both Torridge and Devon – and councillors accepted my proposal that we contact the councils in Northam, Torrington and Holsworthy to seek their support for this position. Of course, if we were being totally pragmatic we would only ask for the car parks, on-street car parking machines and the port as these are some of the few council undertakings that actually make money. The answers to our request should be interesting.
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