Meade grits teeth over councillors' discretionary fund 'distraction'

PAUL MURPHY

A Fine Gael councillor has said he would have given up his councillor’s discretionary grant of €10,000 if the money went to work in his district, whether that went to road improvements or housing adaptations for disabled or elderly people.

Paddy Meade was commenting on the outcome of the council’s annual budget meeting which saw councillors passing a budget of €154 million for 2021, an increase of 11 per cent. He said that councillors were meeting in strange times, a time when there was a severe loss in rates income due to businesses being closed because of the pandemic.

The council CEO and Finance Officer were to be congratulated for their hard work in bringing in a balanced budget. While council members tended to agree on most subjects, they were also united in their aim of seeing the county and its population doing well and wanted to see growth in their communities, in their economies, he said. However, it also should be recognised that the 40 councillors came from different localities, with different priorities.

Before the budget meeting, the majority of councillors wanted to see their discretionary budget not slashed by two-thirds as proposed by the council executive to €5,000. In the event, the figure of €10,000 was agreed.

Cllr Meade said that he had always been dubious about this grant. He said it distracted councillors towards the total increase in discretionary funding – a total increase of €200,000 – instead of the €154m they were there to talk about.

He asked if there had been an option for him to “trade” his discretionary grant towards works in his own district but found there was not. But there was one option which could help the community and that was in road gritting in Winter.

In 2015-16 and 2017-19 he had chaired a sub-committee on road gritting which made recommendations to the Transport Policy Committee which in turn made recommendations to the 40 councillors (and which were accepted). One of the recommendations was to connect the N51 and N52 – the 15km between Slane Castle Gates, on to Donoghue’s bar Woodtown, passing the Sally Gardens Rathkenny and the Mountain House Lobinstown en route.

They had improved gritting on school routes to Slane, Stackallen, Rathkenny, Lobinstown and Newtown and had taken the “notorious” messages “White Hilll is blocked”, “Garda on scene”, “lorry jacknifed” out of regular LMFM traffic reports.

His aim in the annual budget was to see the Winter gritting of Meath County Council regional roads. And there were other roads that needed gritting – Navan to Newgrange and Donore. Regional roads needed prioritising like the one from Kells to Slane connecting Drogheda, bringing areas like Oristown, Kilberry and Stackallen on stream.

Cllr Meade said he was not a lone voice in calling for gritting on regional roads – it was something the council’s transport department also wanted and had even gone to view a new machine for this purpose. “But alas, it was budget dependent and the signal came back that the money wouldn’t be there and so the machine sits in the store unsold and unlikely to be used this year.”