continuing the curious lampost saga

This week we had a curious update on the painting of the lamp posts in the town centre. This came via Owen, I forget his second name, but he's yer man at Capita who's dealing!!!!! with this job. It would appear that they are now waiting on a paint specification from Amey Infrastructure???? It would appear that after 6 months someone somewhere had obviously slipped up on specifying the colour that these posts would be repainted.

Now seeing as they're all grey, well except where the paint has peeled off to expose a previous coat of green, that choosing the colour would have been a no brainer, as they say nowadays. And seeing as how they must be painting lamp posts somewhere in the county, or in the country, that a quick phone call, or better still a simple email would have nailed that problem in five minutes. So why is it taking so long, and why do the ecxcuses keep changeing.

First the painters got a hip problem, then it's a traffic management problem, now it's a wrong sort of paint problem.
We're paying these people- How much do they get paid?, never mind MP's expences, I want to know why they get paid at all.

You know, I confronted Nick Raymond about this back at the fiasco that was the community travel plan meetings. He told me then that we couldn't paint our own Lamp posts because they had to be painted with a special sort of paint. Well if he knew that back then, what's going on now. He also told me that if we painted them we could be done for criminal damage, or that we would have to take ownership of the posts we painted. Not sure if that meant me personally or the town council. Anyway I decided to go down the official route and now look where we are.

No wonder our constituents think that the Town Council are useless, and don't do anything. When faced with this sort of incompetance how can we expect anything to get done. All I can say is thank you to David Parrat, our town clerk, who has persued this on our behalf with some well crafted correspondance, relentlessly, but like he has stated in these exchanges, he should not have to waste his time berateing these heads of departments just to get them to carry out work that they have scheduled, and have a budget to do.

I can see the next excuse coming up, can't you. They'll be telling us next that we've now entered a new financial year and budgets have been reallocated, and due to an underspend of last years budget, there is no money to carry out this kind of work this year.