{"id":2690,"date":"2013-11-12T12:35:56","date_gmt":"2013-11-12T12:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/?p=2690"},"modified":"2024-06-26T18:03:04","modified_gmt":"2024-06-26T18:03:04","slug":"useless-council-awards-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/12\/useless-council-awards-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Useless Council Awards 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It really must be the silly season as two Councils have went head to head racing ahead of others in publicly crowing about their financial incompetence.<\/p>\n<p>Making their bid yesterday was Glasgow City Council. They announced that in a <q><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-24901596\">Cost saving plan<\/a><\/q> they would spend money raising a statue on a plinth. Apparently this would stop <q>Vandals<\/q> from putting a cone on it&#8217;s head. Firstly this hardly counts as vandalism, more like some kind of public installation. more importantly the task of removing the cone costs an alleged \u00a310,000 per year for 100 times at \u00a3100 each. Perhaps a permanent way to reduce this to \u00a30 would be to stop removing the cone.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/dukeofwellingtonstatue-1245102.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/dukeofwellingtonstatue-1245102.jpg\" alt=\"dukeofwellingtonstatue-1245102\" width=\"615\" height=\"409\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2691\" srcset=\"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/dukeofwellingtonstatue-1245102.jpg 615w, http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/dukeofwellingtonstatue-1245102-300x199.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 615px) 100vw, 615px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Closer to home though there is a parking farce at Dundee City Council.<\/p>\n<p>The unelected bureaucrats had decided that Dundee needs some Park and Ride schemes. The ingenius location for the first one to go before the relevent committee was inside the city boundaries, on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thecourier.co.uk\/news\/dundee\/250232\/dundee-west-end-park-and-ride-plan-rejected\/\">west a few minutes from the city centre<\/a>. Just inside the area of the bottleneck roundabout at the Western bounds of the city. Not outside that to reduce congestion at the roundabout, inside that area. Sensibly the councillors saw the stupidity of the scheme and rejected it, no doubt due to the response from their incensed constituents <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thecourier.co.uk\/news\/dundee\/255095\/review-of-all-park-and-ride-plans-after-shock-refusal-of-west-end-scheme\/\">hanging one councillor out to dry<\/a> in the process.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of weeks later there were reports that the Councils <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20131114084849\/http:\/\/www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk\/news\/local\/dundee-city-centre-parking-free-from-three-1.150501\">coffers were down \u00a3365,000<\/a> a year. The cause? Lack of use of car parking spaces in the city centre. Meanwhile the council are claiming that due to how busy the city centre is (and presumably the car parks), Park and Ride schemes must be built, costing millions, to reduce the number of cars parking in the city centre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It really must be the silly season as two Councils have went head to head racing ahead of others in publicly crowing about their financial incompetence. Making their bid yesterday was Glasgow City Council. They announced that in a Cost saving plan they would spend money raising a statue on a plinth. Apparently this would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[724,164,174],"class_list":["post-2690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-council","tag-dundee","tag-glasgow"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2690"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4324,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690\/revisions\/4324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}