Public Meeting - Questions from the Floor

So now it was roving microphone time....

One person pointed out that Powys County Council were in a difficult position because their funding has been cut - leading to comments about the huge salary of the chief executive which was reported recently (set nationally) and a suggestion to save money by reducing the number of county councillors.
And while I'm thinking about this, later in the meeting it was pointed out by James Gibson-Watt that the formula for deciding how much money each county council gets is based on the population. Powys is big, and thinly populated - in fact the population is going down. There is low unemployment in Powys, but this is because we export our unemployed - young people move away so they can get jobs. In turn, this means there are fewer young families, and fewer children going to local schools - so the education funding is cut, and so on down a slow spiral to oblivion. What we need is a way of encouraging inward migration to Powys to boost our population and get more funding!

Volunteering was mentioned as a way to keep services - but why should people volunteer to run services they are already paying for out of their council tax? (Which will be going up next year).
In the case of the Library - volunteers can't run a library. They can assist, but a library needs a trained librarian, and it's the trained librarians that are going to be cut.

Several people said that Powys County Council do not have a coherent policy - they stagger from one crisis to the next. One example of this was the building of the new Museum/Library complex in Brecon, which keeps going over budget and for which there seems to be an open cheque book. This was, said the speaker, "ineptitude", and "they couldn't run a bloody bath!"

It was pointed out that Hay is important to the economy of Powys as a whole, as a tourist destination and base, and if Hay was supported the town could generate more income for the county. Hay deserves a more coherent policy from Powys - and Powys doesn't have a strategy!
The problems that we are facing now, said another speaker, are only going to recur. Can there be an agreement that Powys County Council don't renege on?

James Gibson-Watt took the microphone here, and said that the original agreement worked out between Hay Town Council and the County Council was a good one, and he doesn't understand why the County Council went back on it. It's important to stick to agreements or trust is destroyed. Smaller councils around Powys are being called on to deliver services that the County Council used to deliver, and so trust between them is essential, and needs to be restored. It is shortsighted to close down facilities now because once they're gone, they're gone for good. If we could keep going through this rough patch, retaining our facilities, we would come out of it into a much better position in the next few years.

The Town Council said that it was difficult for them, because very few members of the public turn up to council meetings, and when they did have a Meet the Councillor event only 20 people turned up even though they'd distributed over 2,000 leaflets, to every house in Hay.
To which the reply was - they've got a room full of people now.
Trudy said that, when dealing with the County Council, they felt like ten people in a room - and they needed the evidence that the people of Hay were supporting them, which would give them more power in negotiations.
The Town Council is also restricted by legislation in the way it chooses to spend its money. They can't just give a grant to the Library to keep it going. Again, the total amount they are allowed to give in grants is based on the electoral roll of Hay.

One of the ideas the Town Council do have involves the pot of money which has been sitting quietly in reserve for many years, and which is supposed to be used for a community initiative (this is from the days of the old District Councils, I think). The Town Council basically want to do a swap. The County Council gets that money - about £200,000 - and the Town Council gets the old Library building. The Town Council could then use the building for meetings and a variety of groups, and it would save Powys County Council money in the long term. The Town Council are meeting on Friday (today!) to discuss this.

So I'll end this post on that thought, and wrap up the report tomorrow.