14 October - If you put your foot in it, rejoice over the 16 pence a year you’ve saved
I have known better weekends and I don't just mean the weather which
according to device I have that measures total daily light levels, yesterday was the
dullest day since 24th March.
The old computer which can be reluctant to start looks like being replaced with
one that is reluctant to switch off, due, if Google can be believed, to some
obscure BIOS or driver incompatibility. It will probably fix itself in time as
drivers are updated. It is certainly fast; 33 seconds from switch on to web
access which isn't at all bad for a Windows machine, even if it is twice the
time my Acorn took nearly 20 years ago. However enough of that, has anything happened over the weekend?
Not much by the look of things. An amount of moaning about
the dog mess that
despoils Bexley’s parks and nearby roads. That is of course mainly down to dog
owners but it is perhaps worth reminding readers that it was councillor Gareth
Bacon who decided that those owners should go unpunished. He thought saving
£15,000 on the dog warden contract because it wasn’t making money was a simple
financial decision. Quality of life and your carpets count for nothing.
Bacon
is quite obviously a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It was
him who closed almost all the public toilets too. It’s not impossible that Bexley council
will decide to spend more than £15,000 on web casting its meetings in a totally unnecessary
face saving exercise having been shamed into doing something by Nicholas Dowling’s dictating
machine. The comparative worth must be obvious to all.
Looking forward to the coming week I see that the Cabinet is set to approve a 1%
pay rise for everyone at the Civic Centre. They have not had a rise in the past
four years and few employees will have fared worse than that so this is not
unexpected for the lower paid staff. Not so sure about those from £58,200
upwards (the point at which government guidance dictates that the details should
be published †) and maybe the Chief Executive agrees, for Will Tuckley has said
he won’t accept his pay rise.
The Cabinet will be considering
the measures needed to plug the £40 million black hole to 2018.
† Almost needless to say, this is another piece of government guidance
that Bexley council ignores.
16 pence. A rather simplistic calculation based on Bexley’s 92,600 dwellings. (2011 census.)