Is buying books the best way to use ratepayers' money?
IN RELATION to the council's decision on July 7 regarding the Ballyclare & District Roll of Honour book (Newtownabbey Times, July 22, page 8), I have to register my disagreement with this decision to purchase 50 books, sight unseen, outright with one thousand pounds of ratepayers' money.
Although this may be an excellent book and worth the money, very few members of the council seem to have even seen a copy of it. This council is not a bookstore and if an individual councillor has made a personal promise to the author, or anyone else, then they should be paying this from their own pocket and I would call on this individual to own up and do the right thing.
A remark at the July 7 meeting was apparently to go ahead and purchase the books as "it's only a thousand pounds." Well, I would have to say that to me a thousand pounds is a lot of money, and money we control on behalf of the ratepayer, and in the current financial climate with people losing jobs, finding it hard to feed their families and many more in fuel poverty, is this the best use of money? Surely if the council has a thousand pounds to spare we could have chosen two or three families in fuel poverty and filled their oil tanks for the winter instead of buying books we may never sell.
If these books were to be taken by the council at all it should have been on a sale or return basis so there would have been no outlay to the council's ratepayers and any unsold books could have been returned to the author.
If anything good has come out of this it is the fact that the Chief Executive is now putting together a policy to prevent this type of thing from ever happening again.
Councillor Robert Hill, DUP.
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Weather for Newtownabbey
Wednesday 08 February 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 4 C to 5 C
Wind Speed: 21 mph
Wind direction: South
Tomorrow
Light rain
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