Following a long day of presentations and contributions, the 2013 annual budget for Mayo County Council was adopted with little fuss on Monday evening in Castlebar. The only major change to the adopted budget, which was proposed by Fine Gael whip Cllr Joe Mellett and seconded by Fianna Fáil whip Cllr Micheál McNamara from the draft one that was presented to the members, was the need to find an extra €70,000 to fund some extra projects and to make up a €40,000 shortfall in the fire service budget when the members refused to increase the call out charge for the service from €150 to €200.
Suicide charities Console and Talk About were given €5,000 each. The funding for agricultural shows in the county was increased by €5,000. Fleadh Ceoil and Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Éireann were given €5,000 between them, while the Alzheimers unit in Foxford was also given €5,000. A new sports scholarship was also set up, which will be named after former multiple Olympic champion and Bohola native Martin Sheridan, and was also given €5,000 of funding. That additional €30,000 added into the budget combined with the estimated lowering of income from the fire service call out charge by €40,000, necessitated a €70,000 savings to be found elsewhere, which head of finance Peter Duggan agreed could be found somewhere in the budget.
The council also agreed not to make any change to the commercial rate for 2013 and it will remain at 68.76 in the euro, the same as it has been since 2010. The total budget for 2012 represents a 7.9 per cent reduction on 2012 and 21.3 per cent reduction from the budget in 2008.
Councillors will not take reduction in their notice of motion allocations
A proposal to reduce the councillors’ notice of motion allocation from €30,000 to €25,800 was also shot down by the members. The notice of motion allocations are used by councillors to target specific small road improvement schemes in their area as directed by each individual councillor. It was proposed and adopted by the elected councillors to maintain their funding at the previous level, and that the council would include the €130,200 difference in the road works scheme when it was announced in the near future by the council. The non reinstatement of the Local Improvement Scheme funding by the Government was an issue that caused much anger on the opposition benches in the chamber, with numerous councillors pointing out the difficulty it left for people who live on “private roads” when it came to keeping them maintained, as the council was under no obligation to repair potholes and other issues.
