At the Parish Council Annual General Meeting in May, I presented my Chairman's Report and was re-elected by my fellow councillors for a second year - thank you. Since the vast majority of us do not attend these meetings, I'll summarise my report here.
Over the last year we have lost four councillors by resignation and gained four by co-option and one by election. This high turnover is regrettable, but understandable given the stress of dealing with all the issues that occur. Don't forget that all of us are volunteers on the Parish Council, giving our time to keep your community running.
The big problems over the last year have been to do with money. Parish Council reserves fell by another £9,000 continuing the trend of recent years. This brings our reserves to dangerously low levels, and we need the reserves to finance projects. Thanks to the community in St Ive we installed the fantastic new play equipment. This needed community involvement and fund raising, funding from the solar farm, and landfill funding from Viridor Credits. But we also needed our reserves to pay for the equipment up front before claiming the grant money. So you see that the Parish Council finances are key to future projects. We also need reserves for unexpected bills like the one for £18,000 from Cornwall Council for the 50% business rates discount that they decided to retrospectively to take away from us.
To save money in the future we need to lease Millennium House to Pensilva Community Association. This is a project that has been worked on for two years and is nearly finalised. This has taken a lot longer than planned, but when the users of Millennium House are running it as a community centre, without the financial support of the Parish Council everyone benefits, and the precept can be reduced.
The car park behind Millennium House is in a very bad condition. We are trying to raise funds to relay the car park, but as ever this is a slow process. There has been a bad accident when someone fell over so please be very careful.
Don’t forget the parish
website st-ive-parishcouncil.gov.uk with council meeting agendas and
minutes; also downloadable copies of the Parish Pump. For those of you
who do Facebook, our St Ive Parish Council page is still being updated
with parish news. Phone me, email me on martin.corney@btinternet.com or
"martin corney blog st ive" in search engines will find my blogs for you
to comment on this article and other gems.
