Make councillors volunteers again

Jul 29 2011 by Gordon Bannerman, Perthshire Advertiser Friday

Dear Editor – The petition against the planned incinerator will no doubt prove a total waste of time as Perth and Kinross Council have consistently ignored any form of protest.

This is in the same way that they refuse to meet the public, or listen to objections, to any of their so-called unanimous decisions.

What Perth really needs is a petition to get rid of all of the existing council. They are costing us a fortune in salaries while managing to make one monumental error after another!

Perth needs to revert to the system of a few decades ago when councillors were part-time unpaid volunteers working for the ratepayers.

Politics did not enter into their decision-making and the local ratepayers were happy to see the city grow, not be demolished!

Let’s see how many of the existing 41 councilors would stand for re-election if it was not a full-time, well-paid job, with expenses?

Let’s do away with 20 pence a mile for cycling and 40 pence a mile for driving to the council offices.

If the existing bunch get their way and once again obtain City status for Perth, can we expect them to produce another grandiose idea to celebrate their success?

Perhaps they will attempt bring back the horse-drawn trams that operated from Scone to Cherrybank in the 1920s as the latest tourist attraction.

The project would no doubt cost even more than the Edinburgh tram system, but who cares? The council will assure us that not a single penny of it is coming from the rates.

All of it will be ring-fenced and coming from other organisations.

Now where have I heard that before!

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