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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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25th November '07
You will have heard about a far reaching plan to explore closer working between Torridge and North Devon district councils. Our Chief Executive John van der Laarschot has said that Torridge could save its council taxpayers over a million pounds a year viz. savings in IT of £200,000, savings in waste collection of £400,000 and savings from combining the Senior Management team of both councils of £500,000. He ended his long, unscripted and well presented speech by asking councillors if they had the appetite to go on to the next step? – to which some councillors replied. I kicked off the debate by suggesting that knocking down Barnstaple’s Civic Centre would be no great loss – and any new headquarters of a joint council should be sited in Bideford as the natural geographical centre. One rather more serious point I raised concerned the need to keep councillors fully informed of what was happening – under the last leadership information was treated almost as a state secret and the lack of openness crippled the whole body. I was promised that it would not be the case this time. My second serious point was to warn that ever larger, ever more centralised organisations were always in danger of losing their links to local people and concerns – and I quoted the South West Regional Assembly as an example of this. Des Shadrick joined in to back up my call for transparency and went on to say ‘We need to shape the future rather than having it forced on us’ – a reference to the apparent moves by central government to demand closer working between councils. Councillor Miranda Cox worried at the hastiness of the move and the effect on the morale of TDC officers who would obviously be concerned about the future of their jobs. Her worries were shared by Chris Leather who declared himself ‘Taken aback at the sudden urgency’ of the whole thing and he wondered aloud if reorganisation wasn’t being driven from the ‘top down’ – he certainly hadn’t heard members of the public calling for it. Councillor Bill Pillman added his usual folksy take on things when he remarked that we couldn’t go as we were at the moment in terms of our spending and budget as ‘the meat ain’t there’ (this was said with great emphasis). When the vote was called as to whether to explore closer working together between Torridge and North Devon it was unanimously in favour. I will keep you updated as and when things become clearer.
The Taw and Torridge Estuary Forum brings together all those who use the two rivers whether for recreation, business or whatever and they regularly report their meetings and activities in a newsletter. The latest of these records an update on investigations going on into the waste at the disused landfill site on Northam Burrows. To get some historical perspective a representative from Devon Waste is meeting with the previous Burrows Ranger to discuss the site as well as contacting the Devon County engineer who was involved with it in the 1970s. Trial pits are to be dug to ascertain the depth of the rubbish but permission has yet to be granted from Natural England and Torridge to go beyond the existing boundary fence. Given concerns about global warming and rising sea levels one would hope that the pace of these inquiries was speeded up – if only because any ‘solutions’ may well involve a long term engineering project costing huge sums.
Only two weeks ago I suggested that the issue of leases/tenancies of various council buildings would come back to trouble us. Well it did come back rather sooner than I expected at a recent meeting of Torridge. Councillor Geoff Lee asked a question concerning the leasing of town halls to town councils in the area – which the council solicitor answered by saying that under the 1974 Act which set up the district council the new body only had a responsibility to provide ‘office accommodation’ for the town councils. I have queried this as I could see Bideford town council being sent off to an office at Caddsdown whilst Torridge flogs off the town hall! You may smile but there have been persistent rumours for some time now about the possible disposal of Northam town hall – a case of no smoke without fire perhaps? The solicitor did say he would have to go back to the original agreements to see what was stipulated and I await his findings with interest.
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