The Cabinet Recommends the 2007 Budget for Fylde

On Wednesday night the Conservative Cabinet met to discuss the budget for 2007/08. The Council has worked hard over recent months to reduce costs, embark on joint ventures with other Councils and to pinpoint priorities whilst not being forced into reducing services. A difficult task. The process has involved all Councillors through the Overview & Scrutiny Committees. The budget shortfall was £841,000. There was also a recommendation to adopt a system of local Council Tax raising and spending to ensure that residents could see focused improvements in their area. This was called nicknamed "Equitable Taxation". Although the scheme received majority support from Parish Councils, the Cabinet felt that more work needed to be done with both St annes and Kirkham Town Councils and with the Lytham Forum to work on transferring the same responsibilities to them as operated by other Parish Councils in the Borough. Cabinet recommended that the Council continues to work on ET to this end.

The £841,000 worth of savings were found mainly from removing long standing vacant posts and increased revenues from a variety of operations on council owned facilities. The ultimate goal is for the Council to be able to not only balance the books, but to also be able to invest six figures sums each year in improving all of the Councils facilities. As already reported in previous blogs the previous Lib Dem, Independent and Ratepayer Coalition had one policy, to keep Council Tax levels the lowest in Lancashire, which they did. Although in principle this sounds a worthy cause, if they would have used incremental increases to the same level as Rossendale District Council, this year we would have had almost £2 million pounds of additional funds to invest in town centres, parks, swimming pools etc etc. Food for thought!

On Monday I attended the Lancashire Leader and Chief Executives meeting hosted in Lancaster Town Hall. At this meeting we discussed the challenges we were all facing with funding for concessionary bus travel. It was reported that the bus companies had had a bumper years and that the 14 Councils of Lancashire could receive a share of the £1.8. million pound over target receipts received. This would be approximately £60,000 for Fylde Council. With this in mind the Cabinet agreed to invest this money in Revenue Growth items listed in priority order. They were:

£25,000 to the Fylde Community Projects Fund. This will be matched by the same amount from the LSP. This scheme should see over £100,000 being raised towards local projects this year.
£10,000 for Information, Communication Continuity. Disaster recovery etc.
£8,000 for the removal of Spartina Grass from the Amenity Beach. The Council is going to hold the line just before the Beach Terrace cafe. The loss of the beach at St annes would be a disaster.
£8,500 for new Highway and Park trees.
£3,000 for the Boroughs entry to Nations in Bloom.
£4,000 for low level security lighting on Fairhaven Lake.
£1,500 to kick start a review of on street car parking restrictions in St annes town centre.

The Capital programme was discussed in depth and it was decided to divert funds from some Government priorities to Local ones. By doing this we were able to find £147,000 to spend on capital projects within the Borough. These were:

£12,000 to promenade Lighting in St annes. This amount enables us to upgrade the style of lighting columns from standard ones to Victorian.
£22,000 towards X2 Skydome CCTV cameras and Posts. These will be moved around the Borough to monitor areas of Low Level crime.
£15,000 for investment on youth issues and/or facilities.
£55,000 towards a full refurbishment of the Lytham Cenotaph Gardens.
£8,000 for a new fence for Newton Village playground.
£5,000 for new playground equipment for Newton village.
£5,000 for Willam Pickles Park, Newton village.
£25,000 towards the start of the refurbishment for Warton Sports Pavilion.

The current commitments which the Cabinet also agreed to continue supporting are:

£60,000 for Kirkham Memorial Gardens. (A total of £200,00 will be spent over next 2 years)
£30,000 on car park improvements. (surfacing, lighting etc)
£645,000 for the Heritage restoration of Ashton Gardens.

Many of the Parish bids have been on the books for years and as a result the facilities have declined year on year. The plan is over the next two years to fund these one off Parish Schemes and then to hopefully have the Parish Councils at a stage where they can budget for their long term upkeep. The facilities in the un-parished areas fall into our new planned maintenance programme.

In short we hope that the Council will adopt this budget on the 1st March as it is a budget for improvement and stability, based on need not politics!