In times of austerity..... Options

[spartacus]

....it's nice to know that despite the enormous cuts on the horizon and the potential hike in council tax by nearly 4% every year for the next four years that Thatcham Town Council will still be intending to spend £8,000 on a new website




And it'll bump up it's precept by 2%.

Newbury Town Council will bumping theirs by 4.6% and Greenham by 3%. And this increase will be for less of a service than we currently get of course.

Apart from the continual gripe about Mayoral accoutrements and fur collared robes, is it about time that spending on things such as the Christmas lights were shelved until this financial hump has been cleared? What else can go in a series of easy hits that are luxuries we can no longer afford?

[Simon Kirby]

....it's nice to know that despite the enormous cuts on the horizon and the potential hike in council tax by nearly 4% every year for the next four years that Thatcham Town Council will still be intending to spend £8,000 on a new website

And it'll bump up it's precept by 2%.

Newbury Town Council will bumping theirs by 4.6% and Greenham by 3%. And this increase will be for less of a service than we currently get of course.

Apart from the continual gripe about Mayoral accoutrements and fur collared robes, is it about time that spending on things such as the Christmas lights were shelved until this financial hump has been cleared? What else can go in a series of easy hits that are luxuries we can no longer afford?

Well...

From a budget of around £1,000,000 annually you could probably save half of that without affecting the delivery of anything meaningful. It wouldn't be the Town Council as you knew it, what you'd have is a parish council operating from a room in a community centre with a part-time clerk and full-time park keeper, but the grass would be cut in the parks and open spaces just like it is now and the cemetery would be maintained just as it was, and you'd be hard-pressed to notice any difference.

Like you say, The BID would have to pay for their own Chrimbo light, but the lights would continue as before. The allotments would be self-managed, so the rent would go down and the sites would improve, but the service would continue. The Charter Market would go, but there are other shops, and we might actually get an independent commercial operator that knows how to run a market, and it would be great if we ended up with something like the monthly Frome Independent Market. There wouldn't be a town council mayor, so you wouldn't have to stand up when the chairman of the council paraded in to meetings, and I wouldn't expect there to be any parading-in any more either, but there'd be no reason when interested individuals couldn't use the council's dressing up box and turn up to summer garden parties in fancy dress, so that could continue.

So we'd save half of the £1,000,000 annual running cost and not lose anything of any importance and you'd actually have a parish council more in touch with the people of Newbury so there's a hope that it might actually start engaging and empowering its communities like a proper parish council does.

[Exhausted]

....it's nice to know that despite the enormous cuts on the horizon and the potential hike in council tax by nearly 4% every year for the next four years that Thatcham Town Council will still be intending to spend £8,000 on a new website And it'll bump up it's precept by 2%........

Is that what a website costs. I'm in the wrong job.

[Simon Kirby]

Is that what a website costs. I'm in the wrong job.

Quite. There are any number of free content management solutions out there and they're really easy to set up and use, all it would cost is maybe £100 annually for hosting. It's a gravy train.

[nerc]

And now i believe that Thatcham Town Council have employed the Market Manager of Newbury Market to manage the weekly Market (a conflict of interest) however i guess that TTC dont want the market to continue. You can see what he has done to NTC market so i guess that Thatcham Market will be gone within 1 year.

[On the edge]

And now i believe that Thatcham Town Council have employed the Market Manager of Newbury Market to manage the weekly Market (a conflict of interest) however i guess that TTC dont want the market to continue. You can see what he has done to NTC market so i guess that Thatcham Market will be gone within 1 year.

Ah ha! Presumably this heralds the solution to the Clerk and Finance Officer roles as well.