With special dispensation from the editor, I'm sending this in just after the special Parish Council meeting on 22nd January to set next year's parish council tax. I'm sure everyone will want to know about this as soon as possible, so thank you Joe for holding space for this.
Rumours that the parish part of our council tax (the precept) was going to double in the next year had been going around the parish, so there was a very large turnout at Millennium House from all over the parish. There were many contributions in public participation, from people who were understandably very concerned at the prospect of a large tax increase.
Since I had been keeping track of the budget on a spreadsheet I explained the situation. There are guidelines as to how much money the parish needs to keep in reserve in case of emergencies. We are supposed to keep between three months to a year of expenditure as reserves. Since the total parish expenditure each year, including Millennium House, is about £250,000, the parish reserves of about £100,000 in the 2010-11 financial year was healthy. Unfortunately, in the following years the losses of Millennium House got worse and worse, eating into the reserves, so that at the end of the current financial year we expect to have reserves of about £38,000, well below the lower guideline of about £55,000.
If the parish carried on with no change, the only way to reverse the decline was to increase the precept from the current £52,000 to £90,000. For a band D house a 73% increase from £72 to £125.
The Millennium House Forum have put forward a proposal to run Millennium House as a charity. I strongly support this as it solves a number of problems.
Since I live in the St Ive end of the parish I didn't realise how controversial and divisive the building of Millennium House was. Some love it, others refuse to set foot in the place on principle, even 16 years after it was opened. We residents of St Ive don't see why we should pay through the nose for a massive facility we don't use.
The plan for a charity to run Millennium House means that everyone can be satisfied. The people who want Millennium House can be responsible for running it, while those that don't will not have to pay for it. Also the Millennium House expenditure will no longer be on the parish accounts so the reserves can safely be kept at a lower level.
My proposal for this plan to be financed with an increase of the precept from £52,000 to £62,000 was agreed by the parish council. For a band D house a 19% increase from £72 to £86. I promised this was only for one year after which it will reduce back to what it was, and eventually even less.
There was a call for the precept not to go up at all. This would have meant the parish reserves coming down to a level near going broke, with Cornwall Council taking over and Millennium House closing. The Parish Council went with the difficult decision to increase the precept in order to at least give the people who want it to work a chance.
I will work to help Millennium House Forum set the new system up, but it's going to be up to the people of Pensilva to prove we were right to give that extra £14 over the next year. If you are one of the people who like having a large and expensive community centre in Pensilva please help. As they say, use it or loose it.
