Quote:
Originally Posted by Gayle
Mine arrived.
To be honest, I've been really disappointed by a lot of comments on this thread.
Last year LCC got caught out with the snow and didn't provide enough grit in the bins. HBC were powerless because LCC manage all the gritting so this year tried to do something positive to help the residents.
Unfortunately they got caught out a bit by the early snowfall. I don't know about you, but I can't remember it snowing before Christmas for many, many years - who could have predicted that?
They did their best to get the word out through normal channels - i.e. website, papers, area management meetings etc - so if you didn't find out about it, it's because you actively avoid finding out. It's been a topic of discussion on here for about a month so there's no excuse for not knowing and then subsequently missing out. You can't blame the council for that - they did their best to let everyone know without incurring more costs.
As for the costs - the first post from Ken says that Cllr Ciaren Wells had calculated that it would cost £6.6m to do this. In reality it's been little over £16k. Heaven help us if someone with those maths skills ever gets in power.
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Less has already commented on the £6.6m bit and even Cllr Britcliffe has heard about it as he mentioned it in full council on Tuesday.
(Hi Peter! Nice to know that you're hanging on my every word, sweetheart)
As far as the real cost is concerned it's escalated a good £7,500 above the original budget and will probably rise further. A better way of spending £10k would have been to buy four hand gritters at £630 apiece and just under 3 tonnes of grit for each of the 16 wards (at a current valuation of £4 for 25kg). Some wards aren't going to need 3 tonnes on the footpaths and everyone in the borough would have genuinely benefitted without all this rigmarole of phoning up, shovelling into bags and delivering.
Forgive me for looking for the simple solution instead of a vote-grabbing exercise before a by-election.