What did the public ask at the last public meeting of the Wallasey Constituency Committee?
Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Wallasey Constituency Committee (Wirral Council) 12th March 2019 Part 1 of 2
Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Wallasey Constituency Committee (Wirral Council) 12th March 2019 Part 2 of 2
Yesterday saw the last Wallasey Constituency Committee public meeting in Committee Room 1 at Wallasey Town Hall as next month it will be no more.
Indeed, its Chair Labour Cllr Bernie Mooney is also leaving as a councillor in a few weeks.
There were two members of the public who asked questions. Firstly a member of the public asked why council tax was going up, why Wirral Council had bought the Vue Cinema in Birkenhead (see picture above) and what Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram would be spending the extra money that the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority would receive from Wirral residents this year through the LCRCA precept on the council tax.
The Chair Cllr Bernie Mooney said that it wasn’t the right meeting for a proper answer, but if he left an email address then Wirral Council employees could send him a proper answer.
The same member of the public then brought up the issue of flytipping outside a building in Wallasey and the response (or lack of it) from absent Cllr Pat Hackett and the Merseyside Police. In addition he asked why the Corporate Director for Children’s Services Paul Boyce (a Wirral Council employee) was paid an annual salary of £146,625?
The Chair (who is also the Cabinet Member for Children & Families) explained that his salary was the “going rate”. Cllr Anita Leech (Cabinet Member for the Environment) responded to the point about flytipping.
Finally the same member of the public made a point about community engagement. The Chair referred him to representatives from community groups sitting behind him.
Another member of the public Father Leon Ostaszewski raised issues about the future of the library service, road surfaces of various roads in Wallasey that he had noticed as a cyclist and he also asked if people knew what was happening to St John’s Church.
The Chair said they would pick up his questions and move onto the next agenda item.
The rest of the public meeting was mainly about the Wallasey Constituency Committee’s underspent budget and councillors discussing and debating how the money should be spent.
If you click on any of the buttons below, you’ll be doing me a favour by sharing this article with other people.
And the pont of this meeting was?
£146, is the going rate and you wonder why the council tax is going up, they can’t do the job for £30.000 a year?
Sack the lot of them i say! Wirral is a disgrace you only have to look at the block grids, sunken pavements and the pools of water every time it rains, shocking road surfaces, litter every where and we are paying for what?
I agree the surface water flooding on the roads was bad yesterday and there are many roads that have lots of patches or are extremely rough!
In the fifties me and my old fella used to regularly escape Tuebrook in his motorbike and sidecar and we’d journey over to the Wirral. It was I suppose some sort of escape. I loved the buildings of Wallasey and Birkenhead, I loved New Brighton, I was fascinated that homes had curtains on their windows and above all I always used to think that these places on the Wirral peninsular were loved and cared for.
Since my families expulsion from Liverpool that was something to do with a sort of cleansing of militant trade unionists, I’ve always returned to my home City and spent the odd day travelling around to the places on the Wirral that used to feed my childish love for the area.
Over the years, from a place of afar I’ve watched the gradual decline of the Wirral and it’s architecture and people spaces and I’ve come to this conclusion. If motorbikes with sidecars we’re still being manufactured and used today, fathers from the Wirral would now pop their kids in the sidecar and drive them the other way beneath the Mersey to see my old City and gain comfort from a place that looks like it’s actually cared for.
I’ll forever love the Wirral. But, it’s a childish memory of a place that barely now exists. It’s essentially now a tragic representation of its once glorious former self and to see it and walk around it all, through my eyes, is now very sad and melancholy, and it’s all because nobody in authority seems to care. Nobody seems to want to halt its decline. Truth is, it’ll take more than some new block paving on the New Brighton promenade to bring the Wirral back to a place vaguely reminiscent of its once glorious past.
My warmest regards John and Lenora. Rob.