Friday 15 April 2016

Council Meeting - Cemeteries, Council Tax, Recycling

Councillors have been researching how to run a cemetery themselves, and they're looking around the area of the present cemetery for suitable extra land to use. They talked to the people at Llangynidr, which has four burials a year, and were told it involved a lot of official paperwork. Talgarth has about fifteen burials a year, but they seemed to find it a lot easier - and cheaper. A burial at Llangynidr costs around £300, whereas a burial at Talgarth costs around £150, though actually digging the grave appears to be extra.
And to prevent premature deaths, there will be a course on using the defibrillator that is kept near the Clock Tower. The trainers will do the two hour course in return for a donation, and want ten people or so to go along. The Chamber of Commerce will be asked for volunteers to do the training, and Rob Golesworthy expressed interest too. If there's not enough room in the Council Chambers, they may re-locate to the top floor of the Granary, or even the Buttermarket.

Hay's Council Tax has been held steady this year - in contrast to many other places in Powys. The average rate increase was 8.1%, but Talgarth put their rates up by 31% and Knighton by 43%! On the other hand one place managed to reduce their rates by 78% (I wish I'd caught the name of the place that managed to do that!). The Town Clerk from Welshpool will be visiting Hay soon to find out how the councillors here have managed to get such good deals from the County Council.

Suggestions that the recycling facilities should be moved from the car park to the Market (entrance opposite the Swan) have been met with opposition from Powys. They say that the lorries that collect and drop off the recycling containers wouldn't be able to get into the Market car park - though stock lorries delivering and taking away the animals seem to manage all right. The recycling facilities take up 14 car parking places in the main car park at the moment - and the councillors would prefer to see cars parking there.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The car parking spaces may be given back sooner then Hay Town Council think!
"Community recycling sites and ‘point bins’ to be cut"
http://www.brecon-radnor-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=101991&headline=Community%20recycling%20sites%20and%20%E2%80%98point%20bins%E2%80%99%20to%20be%20cut&sectionIs=news&searchyear=2016
Councillor John Powell, Cabinet Member for Environment and Sustainability, said: “Since the rollout of the kerbside recycling all households now have their recycling collected from the kerbside and this has resulted in a duplication of service which is not cost effective.
“The cost of operating these community sites is more than £300k a year and as with other councils in Wales their use has reduced since the introduction of kerbside recycling.
“We will now review the provision of these sites across the county following a detailed assessment on an area by area basis.”