This article is from page 17 of the 2008-06-10 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 17 JPG
CLARE County Council spent al- most €5 million on private consult- ants in 2007 it was revealed at last nights meeting of the local author- ity.
Responding to a motion put forward by Councillor Martin Conway (FG), the local authority revealed that it spent a total of €4,936,000, or more than €2,700 per day, on consultants last year.
“We are spending a serious amount of money on consultants. Surely to God we don’t need all these. At this time of financial difficulties I wonder could a lot of this not be dealt with in-house,” said Cllr Conway.
“We have had a number of nega- tive issues with contractors lately, and one on the Lisdoonvarna to Bal- lyvaughan road in particular. We need to make sure that we are get- ting value for money. Maybe we need to bring in consultants to make sure that we are getting value for money from our consultants.”
The meeting heard that the majority of consultants fees was spent on large projects such as the Ennis bypass. In addition to this some €400,000 was spent in the interactive video exhibi- tion at the Cliffs of Moher.
“Really the expenses on consult- ants are spent in the area of infra-
structure. The Ennis bypass was a large amount of this funding and the NRA would have paid for a lot of that,” said Clare County Manager Alec Fleming.
‘The second biggest area of invest- ment here would have been water services. We have €60 million work done on this and we plan to spent another €200 million in backing that up. We need to have an expert consultant on some of the bigger projects.
“If you have a very large product like the Ennis bypass you need to have a large expertise there and it would not be possible to build up that experience in house. Now that the Ennis bypass has been completed this will not appear on our budget for the coming years.
In a related motion, Councillor Martin Lafferty (IND) called on cutbacks to be made in the area on CLO ITIUU LEAT OT ACR
“I would be urging the county man- ager to indicate where savings could be made. Are there areas where we could cut back? If we spend this money the people who will lose out are our own local workers and the services that will be available for the people,” he said.
You should keep a tight reins on these expenses to see us through a particularly tough year.”