Tax bill is a headache for all
Thursday 12th February 2009, 7:59AM GMT.
LETTER: “Council facing tax proposal headache” was a headline in your newspaper on January 28, so the council has a similar headache that we, the people of the borough, have.
We have had this headache for many years, trying to find the money to pay the extortionate demands of the council.
We then watch helplessly as they squander the money on schemes like Trench Lock, Ketley lights, the Thomas Telford public house.
They have recently spent a considerable amount of money on Meeting Point House yet, under the Transforming Telford project, they plan to demolish it along with the library, ice rink and no doubt anything else that stands in the way.
They sell the office building and then build a bigger one about 200 yards away. Why not extend and improve the existing one?
They have just announced the purchase of Edgbaston House in Wellington, but because of commercial confidentiality they are unable to tell us how much of our money they have spent. Have they paid over the odds, will we ever know?
I would urge Councillor Eade and his colleagues when setting this year’s council tax to eliminate the misuse of public money and take the people of the borough’s worsening circumstances into account.
This could lead to a reduction or at least a freeze at last year’s levels bearing in mind the extra money coming from the Government.
I live in hope – with the headache pills close at hand.
J R Elcock
St Georges
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Yeah …. I can see that happening.
Tory Telford are proving to be supreme tax squanderers, just like their predecessors. Mr. Eades prepared us for this months ago when he said that he would find it IMPOSSIBLE to not raise council tax in 2009, despite more central government money being put into the trough and seemingly blind to the fact that we’re in a recession, so there is a downward pressure on prices, meaning that the bought-in services and dozens of consultants will be cheaper to acquire this year. But there again, if it’s like Edgbaston House, as Mr. Elcock indicates, then don’t expect “value for money” to be top of the needs list – too much effort, methinks, for the council to actually look around for a better deal when they can still be assured that suffering tax-payers will be locked up in jail if they don’t hand over the increasing amounts of lolly. Bet councillors’ and managers’ expenses won’t suffer too much though.
Small moan about waste: I was driving down the EP last night and ran into a wall of darkness in the rain, between Ketley and Oakengates; they spend HUGE sums on digging out perfectly good lights and replacing them with a different style of perfectly good lights on this road and then can’t find the money (or competence maybe?) to actually turn them on.
Time to move to the new Shropshire authority where they seem to have caught the Reality Train to the real world and have had the decency to stop squeezing tax payers by freezing tax during 2009 at least, whereas the train now standing at Telford smells of bull and has gravy all over it.
(PS One more tip to the council to raise money: CHARGE YOUR EMPLOYEES FOR PARKING IN YOUR CAR PARK! The rest of us have to pay for the pleasure of going to work every day, why should council employees be any different? Either that, or let the people who actually paid for its construction, to use it free of charge as well.)
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