Monday 19 November 2012

Icklesham Parish Council meeting 12 November 2012

A bumper turnout:  10 members of the public. However, several were there to ask the council to write in protest to East Sussex against the proposed downgrading of the Ridge Fire Station. Two others came on behalf of the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve about the Rye Harbour car park. There was also County Councillor Keith Glazier (‘see no evil’), District Councillor Nick Ramus (‘hear no evil’) and District Council Paul Osborn (‘speak no evil’) plus Malcolm Johnson from the District Council trying to offload the Rye Harbour car park and public toilets onto the parish council.
Rother has cut the grant it was making to Icklesham PC for a traffic gateway at Rye Harbour from £737 to £370. Cllr Osbourn claimed the credit for getting even this grant but Cllr Bronsdon was keen to award the credit to the Deputy Clerk (now that reminds me of an interesting story).
The council has secured its first serious grants, £23,000 and £5,000, toward the new £55,000 Icklesham playground. The council had previously been contemplating borrowing up to £100,000 to fund this and other playground projects. The first grant was the work of the departing clerk and the second was down to Cllr Warren.

The resignation of the Parish Clerk
This was the elephant in the room. Steve Foreman, clerk since 2011 has resigned. Nothing at all was said at the meeting but there was a certain tension in the room, as though certain councillors were anxious that someone would raise the issue.
Steve is the fourth clerk lost by Icklesham PC in six years. The reasons for Steve’s resignation will be the subject of a forthcomng blog. Suffice it to say for the moment that Steve, who retired from the Audit Commission before becoming clerk, proved himself to be exceptionally energetic and efficient. He has also been very conscious of proper procedure and the need for impartiality. This has not endeared him to certain councillors and he has been subject to unfair and improper criticism. His position has also been undermined by the inevitable failure of the chairman, Jim Horsman, to do his duty.
Cllr Stanford could not resist an opportunity to take a pointless pop at Steve over his report on discussions about the Rye Harbour car park and toilets, where he had referred to representatives of the residents. Cllr Stanford was keen to stress that the persons concerned had not attended at representatives. Thus a molehill became a mountain.

Parish bus service
This expensive and ill-conceived experiment has been canned, not by the council, but by Rye Community Transport, who became depressed at the low rate of use. The highest number of users was 42, in June. In October, just two people made use of the service. Of the 100 under-16s projected to use the service in the first five months, only four did so.
The last two passengers cost their fellow council tax-payers £311 each! But what is even startling is the fact that even if usage had hit the parish council’s target of 60 per month, it would still have cost council tax-payers £9.42 per person. It would have been cheaper to hire separate taxis for each person!
The report by Rye Community Transport makes for sober reading. It accuses Icklesham Parish Council of not properly researching the demand for a bus service and queries the value of the survey carried out by the Rother Voluntary Association. A sharp contrast was drawn with the way that RCT develops new services. Unfortunately, lack of solid research underlies virtually all Icklesham projects. The vast expenditure on new playgrounds has gone forward despite a complete lack of knowledge of the number and age of children in the parish.

Parish Office
The council is still determined to inflate its overheads by opening an office and appears to have approved the idea in principal. The latest suggestion is the sports pavilion at Icklesham, which the Icklesham Trust wishes to rebuild. This is rather more salubrious that the previous suggestion, which was the public toilets in Winchelsea, should they be rebuilt. Some councillors also see the pavilion at Icklesham as a way for the parish council to inject some money into that project but there may be some reluctance in the Icklesham Trust to have the council so intimately involved. However, the council’s proposal may anyway be derailed if Cllr (Peter) Turner persists in his suggestion that, if there is a parish office in the pavilion, the toilets should be open to the public. Cllr Warren doubted that Icklesham Trust would be happy with the idea. What is it about the parish office and toilets?
One cannot help but get the impression that this is just another chance for Icklesham Parish Council to waste more tax-payers’ money. Very few parishes have parish offices: why Icklesham? No good reasons have been put forward. Indeed, the idea has never been properly discussed. A parish office in Icklesham would simply serve Icklesham. How many residents are likely to travel the three miles from Rye Harbour, or even bother to come up from Winchelsea Beach or travel from Winchelsea? Most people will continue to phone or e-mail, if they need to contact the clerk (and few bother to even do that).
Something to watch if a parish office is opened: will the clerk(s) continue to receive the unusual perk of being paid to travel to work?

Rye Harbour car park
Rother want to shift financial responsibility for the car park at Rye Harbour (and possibly the public toilets) to the parish council. There is of course a basic economic flaw in the whole proposition. Offering the car park to the parish suggests that, either Rother is admitting that it is so incompetent that even Icklesham PC could do better (remember, this parish council felt that locking of the gates to the Pear Tree Marsh allotments was beyond it) or is Rother just trying to shift the cost from their budget to that of the parish because the latter is not subject to capping.
Parish councillors recognised that, if the council took over the car park, they would have to charge for parking, but no one raised the associated cost of ticket machines and employing staff to service the machines and enforce parking charges or also installing barriers. As Rother would also have to start charging if they were to retain control of the car park, why should Icklesham Parish Council get involved? All they will get is the flak.
Then, there are the public toilets. These cost about £20,000 a year to run and, sometime during the 99-year lease, will have to be rebuilt.
Rother have floated the idea of covering losses for the first few years on a sliding scale (eg 100% of year 1 reducing to 0% by year 5 or 10), but no mention has been made of the capital costs of installing parking infrastructure. Nevertheless, the Council agreed to the idea in principle.
A Rye Harbour resident in attendance expressed her concern about car park charges leading to parking congestion along the streets of the village. She asked for residents to be involved in any discussions, which does not suggest much faith in the representation provided by Rye Harbour councillors. But then Cllr Bronsdon of Rye Harbour believes he does not need to consult, on the grounds that, if voters don’t like what he decides, they can vote him out at the next election. There would be some logic in that, except that Rye Harbour rarely has contested elections in Rye Harbour, in part, because no resident can be bothered to stand (Cllr Bronsdon lives in Rye and Cllr Stanford in Winchelsea Beach).

Parish post boxes
Readers will recall that, during the debate over turning off the footlights in Winchelsea, a resident and member of the former corporation in Winchelsea, Mr John Spencer, questioned the integrity of Winchelsea ward councillors by implying that they would tamper with survey questionnaires (the first of the three ballots) given to them by residents to return to the council. Mr Spencer later accused Cllr Comotto of submitting a questionnaire on behalf of his under-age daughter and tried to see how other residents had voted by making a Freedom of Information request to see everyone else’s questionnaire. Cllr Stanford proposed that, because some residents (ie Mr Spencer) did not want to communicate with the council via their elected councillors, the council should set up post boxes in each ward. £400 was budgeted. The cost has turned out to be £160 per post box. Another well researched project!
Even Icklesham Parish councillors baulked at £640. The idea then rapidly unravelled. Councillors came to the conclusion post boxes were impractical. Where would they be installed, who would empty them, how often and so on? In the end, it was decided to place a box, which will be made by a councillor at no charge, inside Rye Harbour Stores to see if anyone uses it. That still means that £400 has been taken from tax-payers because councillors did not bother to think through another silly idea!
The council also missed a point of principle here. Although Mr Spencer apparently does not like the representatives who were elected to represent Winchelsea, even his personal friend and fellow jurat Cllr Turner, why should the council help him to circumvent his properly-elected representatives? Does any other elected body make special provision for voters who don’t like their elected representatives?
Cllr Stanford’s proposal for parish post boxes also begs the question as to why unhappy residents cannot phone, e-mail or send a letter to the clerk. Cllr Stanford said the post is too expensive and, of course, not everyone has e-mail. But is there someone out there who does not have a phone or e-mail, cannot afford a postage stamp, and dislikes all their elected councillors? Surely, it would have been cheaper for the council to buy Mr Spencer a book of stamps?

And yet more money wasted
Another £500 of council tax has been poured down holes in Smeatons Lane.
The council went ahead and spent £540 on allotment software (support and maintenance costs will be extra). There is a problem apparently with continuing to run a spreadsheet for some 50-60 plots.
At the insistence of Cllr Merricks, the council registered its playgrounds as part of the ‘Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Fields’, in order to stop itself building on them in the future. This is an utter waste of money. The clerk advised the council that it was unnecessary, because sufficient safeguards are already provided by the restrictive covenants on these pieces of land but he was over-ruled. No other parish in Rother has registered its playgrounds. Moreover, the council took the decision to go ahead without finding out the cost. Their decision was therefore illegal. Now, the council has discovered that its titles to Icklesham Recreation Ground and Harbour Field at Winchelsea Beach have not been registered at the Land Registry and it cannot find its deeds of ownership. Curiously, Cllr P Turner was supposed to have sorted all these out when he was chairman over 10 years ago.
The council has budgeted £2,000 to ‘refresh’ its Local Action Plan. Can £2,000 bring back something from dead? The LAP achieved response in most wards which were lower than the turnout in the election of Police and Crime Commissioners! It was of course also the cause of the complaint to Rother Standards Committee by other councillors against Winchelsea ward councillors, which the latter won earlier this year, when an appeals tribunal overturned Rother’s flawed judgement and dismissed the accusations.
On 26 November, the council will hold a special meeting to consider its budget for 2013/14. There is a question mark over the legitimacy of the meeting. Expect more whacky ideas on how to spend your money.

Cllr Sutton
The council wasted more time on a proposal by Cllr Sutton that the council should employ a maintenance man for a day a week to do small jobs around the parish at the bidding of individual councillors. The council already employs a maintenance man to do small jobs, although only as and when he is needed, and under the direction of the clerk. It is illegal for work to be commissioned by individual councillors, but why should the long-serving Cllr Sutton (proud alumni of Winchelsea primary school) know that? The reason why certain jobs in Winchelsea Beach appear not to be getting done is because Cllr Sutton does not report them to the clerk.
Ironically, Cllr Sutton is one of the reasons why councillors are no longer required to conduct monthly inspections of their ward --- a perfection occasion to report faults --- having admitted, after several years, that he did not know what he was supposed to be doing and that he therefore did not bother. This item should not have come onto the agenda.

Planning
Cllr Ramus welcomed a letter from Winchelsea Heritage expressing concern about planning enforcement at Rother, which is apparently a matter of growing concern on the Planning Committee.

Youth Club
One positive piece of news. Cllr Lyward has her youth club up and running in Winchelsea Beach. However, the skate park may have been put back on the agenda by the meeting to set up the club.

Postscript
Cllrs Austen and Chishick said nothing throughout the meeting, but Cllr Chishick had the excuse that he was abroad. Cllr Moore managed one contribution.

RC

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