Lisburn Lives On
Last Monday I attended a meeting of Lisburn council which replaced the outgoing mayor the DUP's Alan Ewart, with his party colleague Paul Porter. the SDLP's Brian Heading got the deputy's post. I wasn't there for the mayoral election in particular, but to witness Edwin Poots' last day as a councillor. Both the Environment Minister and the local MP, Jeffrey Donaldson, stood dwon as part of their committment to phase out double jobbing.
Mr Poots, however, will continue to have rather a lot to do with councils in his role as minister in charge of local government. As pointed out previously here, last week's Executive failure to move ahead with the streamlining of the 26 councils was rather lost in the inevitable focus on the Bloody Sunday inquiry. This week councils which might have assumed they were going to be merged with their neighbours are now planning for fresh elections and five more years of life.
At Lisburn I came across the veteran councillor Seamus Close decrying the failure to push ahead with the 11 council plan as a lost opportunity to provide the ratepayer with a better deal. Sinn Fein's Paul Butler refused to buy Mr Poots' arguments that the financial figures didn't add up - instead he insisted that DUP reservations about the proposed council boundaries and the model of power sharing envisaged for the new councils lay at the heart of the debacle.
The minister remains unrepentant, arguing that, without futher efficiencies provided by the collaboration of the councils in providing their business services, the shake up would have cost more than it would have saved. He claims Sinn Fein, not the DUP, has held up the proposals on sharing power in the council chamber.
So where now? Mr Poots maintains that the 11 council model isn't dead. Instead he wants to work towards its eventual implementation. He met local government representatives on Wednesday and asked them to come back to him within 2 weeks with their proposals for further collaboration and efficiency. Until then he is not knocking on the head any future funding for the so called Transition Committees on which councillors were meant to be charting a way forward.
The department also tells me that the minister still wants to give the councils powers over planning, but this will be subject to Executive approval. Sinn Fein, who remain annoyed about the failure to push ahead with the RPA, may have a problem with putting such potentially sensitive powers into the hands of councils which are not yet signed up to new governance rules.
So far as staff are concerned some may have been looking forward to pay offs but others will be relieved that the threat of mergers leading to redundancies has lifted. the department has lifted a freeze on recruitment which has been in place since October 2009.
Veteran councillors, however, look like missing out on the severance payments which could have given them £1000 for every year of their service. As Seamus Close joked with me, he may now have to go cap in hand to his bank manager to plead penury in these harsh economic times. Still at least he has the freedom of the city of Lisburn (recently granted to him, the UUP's Ivan Davis and Edwin Poots' father, DUP veteran Charles Poots) to give him some comfort.
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