NEW winter opening times for County Durham’s household waste recycling centres will come into effect next week.
Revised opening hours for sites operated by Durham County Council will begin on October 1st and stay in force until the end of March.
The Household Waste Recycling Centre (HWRC) at Potterhouse Lane in Pity Me will be open seven days a week from 9am until 3.30pm.
The centre will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Over the last few years as your local Lib Dem councillors we have done a great deal to help protect the environment and help promote a sustainable future. This has included:
These are just the ones I can think of of the top of my head. We are always keen to hear about other proposals from residents about ways we can do our bit to protect and improve the environment, including measures which save money.
Please let us know about any ideas you think could help our area.
The repair works to Dryburn Road which we pushed for have started. The whole stretch is to be resurfaced, and there will be some traffic problems for the next few weeks whilst the work is done, but after it’s finished the patchwork quilt of filled in potholes will be gone. Funding for this has come from the Coalition government. We have been pushing the council to repair this road for quite some time. Great result.
Restricted parking in front of the Beech Road shops has now been implemented. We wanted to make sure that visitors to the shops had somewhere to park. Mamie, Amanda and I have used local funding to make these changes. By having three hour parking, it reduces the risk of people parking here and going off to Durham or the Hospital all day. Hopefully it will now mean the businesses here will be boosted and customers have somewhere to park.
We are monitoring it for the next six months to see the overall effect.
As well as the reserves issue, we again thrashed out concerns about sickness absence levels today.
Sickness absence is running at nearly 12 days a year per employee (that’s on average). Over the last twelve months the council has lost over 93,000 employee work days to sickness.
What is just as striking is that more than thirty percent of staff did not have an appraisal in the last twelve months. How on earth can an organisation run properly when nearly a third of its staff haven’t even had an annual meeting with their boss to discuss their past twelve months performance.
Labour-run Durham County Council is failing its staff. Your Lib Dem councillors have been going on about sickness absence and staff appraisals for years and years. (more…)
At Corporate Issues committee today I challenged officers on reserves. (The Council have 50 pots of money). Some allocated to nothing, others apparently allocated for future needs). We were told that the Council is/wants to use £75m of reserves between 2011-2017.
So for example if reserves were £100m you would expect to have £25m left wouldn’t you?
That is what officers and the Labour Party want the public to think. The reality is though that they are saying they will use £75m but not telling us how much they are putting into reserves. They add money in and then take it back out but:
If you add £100m to reserves but only take out £75m then you have more left than before. You can’t then say in a public meeting that you have used a lot of reserves because quite clearly you have actually added to reserves. (more…)
Today, a report goes to full council to approve the addition of 86 comments into the County Plan submission which were “overlooked” previously. As most people know, most public comments have been ignored throughout this process, but the report makes for interesting reading as it is clear that if you are a developer, your comments are taken very seriously. So the Developers Charter that is the County Plan marches on.
Interesting reading for those who have been following the County Plan. The report says at one point that any requests for greenbelt land to be erased are being passed to the examiner. We can only hope that those views against destroying the countryside are also equally considered.
http://democracy.durham.gov.uk/documents/s44008/County%20Durham%20Plan%20Feedback%20Supplement.pdf
I was checking the stats this week and suddenly realised that this site has now had more than half a million hits. I will update the hit counter page today. Thank you to everyone who reads the site and emails me comments off the back of it. We are currently delivering our quarterly leaflet (a bit late this year), to make sure that everyone including those not online get to know about what we are doing in the local area. If by next week you haven’t received a copy please do let us know in case we missed a few houses.
Interesting story about the Labour Clothing allowance in the Northern Echo today. Whilst we told residents that this was being scrapped a while ago. Official confirmation in the press.
Of course the chairman still gets a whopping great £6650 chairmans allowance pls £13300 for being a councillor, and can claim expenses instead of the clothing allowance, so they are not hard up by any means. Good old Labour socialists eh? Labour councillors claimed the £12000 clothing allowances for the chair and vice chair for 30 years without anyone knowing about it until we unearthed it by accident after looking at the cost of councillors.
Perhaps those chairmen still alive who claimed this behind closed doors should consider a donation to a local charity which helps struggling families with cheap or free clothing.
Your labour-run council is going ahead with taking a million pounds out of the local economy and charging households £20 to take away your garden waste.
Our press release of last week which was not published in the papers: