This article is from page 18 of the 2012-10-02 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 18 JPG
UNPRECEDENTED cuts to services will be inflicted on Clare County Council this winter unless an unlikely change of heart is forthcoming from the Department of the Environment over the next seven days.
Following a mix-up concerning Clare Fine Gael deputies Joe Carey and Pat Breen and the Minister for the Environment, Phil Hogan (FG), the council is now faced with cutting € 243,000 more from its budget, over just three months.
County Manager, Tom Coughlan, declined to go into detail over how these cuts could be achieved as he doesn’t want to create alarm in the county.
A proposal to use an overdraft facility to carry the quarter of a million debt to next year’s budget was also turned down by Mr Coughlan.
“To be honest, I am slow to give an answer to what the impact of this will be. I don’t want to be alarmist. If there is not a positive response from the meeting [a proposed meeting between Minister Hogan and Clare Fine Gael deputies], we are really running out of time,” he said.
“I have not brought proposals to you today for reducing the budget, but the longer we wait, the more difficult it is going to be. The council has an obligation to operate within its budget.
“Any move to operate outside the budget would put Clare County Council in a very difficult position and would store up this problem for another day. If we wait for two weeks, that is two weeks gone – and that will make this much more difficult.
“As of now, we are just over 68 per cent compliance rate. Collecting every 0.01 per cent is getting increasingly difficult. Without the cut of € 240,000, it would already be extremely difficult to balance this budget.”
Former Mayor of Clare, Pat Hayes (FF), said that the cuts could result in basic services such as street lights being turned off.
“Ultimately, this is not our fault and we are going to pay in cuts to frontline services. I am very disappointed by the tactic here, especially that there are no government representatives here today.
“This is bad politics. There will be lights that will be turned off, roads that won’t be repaired and services that will be cut,” he said.