Page 52 - Phonebox Magazine April 2011

Councillor Corner
A contribution from Cllr Debbie Brock and Cllr Peter Geary
THE MILTON KEYNES COUNCIL BUDGET
Milton Keynes Council met on February 22nd to decide a budget for the following year. This is the meeting where any rise in council tax is set and where the spending for the year is set out. The challenges of setting a budget this year are well documented elsewhere but the meeting was a challenge in its self with the first budget being voted down by Full Council (at 1.45am) and an agreement having to be made between the administration and the Labour group to see a budget passed.
There were 11 proposed amendments to the Budget from people looking to change some lines in the budget but also to put strategic challenges, a criteria for following budgets to work to.
One amendment that failed was a proposal to have over £1.2m that was designated to build a traveller site at Fenny Lock changed to be spent on either renovating existing council housing or building new affordable housing in the area. This proposal was defeated and therefore a traveller site will now be built on land at Fenny Lock.
The budget also saw the removal of nearly 300 positions from Milton Keynes Council. Some of these are posts that are currently vacant, some of these will be filled by voluntary redundancy and some will unfortunately be by making people redundant. There will be many changes bought about by the new budget that will be seen as the year unfolds but one of the most noticeable ones will be the turning off of the street lights on the grid roads. The lights will be left on at roundabouts and major road junctions but the rest will not work. It is suggested this will give a saving of just over £300,000 to the budget. The council also cut £250,000 from the road maintenance budgets and over £300,000 from public transport, the ramifications of the latter will be highlighted below. As you will no doubt have found out from your council tax demands there has been no rise taken this year. One of the main reasons for this was the
governments pledge that they would increase the grant to local councils who did not increase council tax this year.
BUS SERVICE CHANGES
The recent budget agreed by Milton Keynes Council has seen the support for public transport cut and this has meant cuts to subsidised services. Many of the services to the rural areas are currently subsidised as the usage does not make the journey commercially viable however the bus is a vital link to many people and as such receives a subsidy.
Some of these cuts will affect our rural area, one of the proposals will be to be cut the 42 service that serves Newton Blossomville, Clifton Reynes and also Tyringham and Filgrave. This is the only bus that services these villages and it was proposed to be cut in the near future. We have however managed to get a delay while we try to find a way to ensure that a public transport system of some sort can continue to link these villages for people who do not have a car. We will in the near future be putting out a survey in these villages to find out what current demand there is and also where the most vulnerable users are. Other services that are to be cut are the X9 which has not received the usage that had been hoped for. The future of the service that currently links Olney to Northampton via Weston Underwood, Ravenstone and Stoke
Goldington is not yet known. This is a cross border service that is run by Stagecoach from Northampton and was subsidised by Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes jointly. The Northamptonshire part of the subsidy is to be cut yet despite many attempts to find out about possible changes to the services no answers have yet been forthcoming either by the
operator or the council
in Northants. From this
end we will once again
do our best to ensure a service is maintained to these villages and have received some assurances that Milton Keynes Council will support this. It is not anticipated that the service will change until the autumn but we will keep everyone informed about when changes are likely to take place.
TRAFFIC SURVEY
You may have noticed some delays on the A509 over the last week as origin and destination surveys have been taking place to find out where Heavy
Goods vehicles travelling through Olney are coming from and going to. Milton Keynes Council officers work in partnership with Thames Valley Police officers in operations of this type. It is part of a strategy that we have long supported and one of the first steps to try to get HGV traffic removed from the A509. The information gained from the surveys will be vital in informing a strategy to remove the heavy traffic from the centre of Olney and the first step in what will be reinvigorated discussion with neighbouring authorities and business to lower both the congestion through Olney and also ease the pollution in the High Street South & Bridge Street area. We will keep everyone informed in future articles on the results of this and also of the further strategy but this is an important stage in the process.
OLNEY’S COMMUNITY CHOIR
Debbie recently visited a rehearsal of the Olney Community Choir which practices on Thursday evenings at the Olney Infant School from 6.30-8pm, on the same night they were having a visit from inspirational guest singer Lillian Boutte. There was a fantastic atmosphere and it was wonderful to see so many people coming together all having a great time singing and sounding so very good.
The choir are getting ready for a concert to be held on July 9th at St Peter & St Paul’s
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Church, Olney with proceeds going towards Willen Hospice. Congratulations to everyone involved with the tremendous success of this venture and to organiser extraordinaire and vocal talent Gillian Toosey.
Our next surgery will take place on Friday April 8th from 7.30-8.30pm at The Olney Centre. Please feel free to come along if we can help with any issue or contact us at any time on the details given.