The members of the Ballina Electoral Area Committee will meet next week to work out the road works plan for the area with senior engineers from Mayo County Council. At Wednesday’s monthly meeting of the committee the idea was mooted that the individual councillors would not take up the potential €7,000 that can be allocated to Local Improvement Scheme (LIS ) works on private roads and they would put the money back into public road works budget.
The LIS scheme had been used for a number of years by councillors to get roads which are not under the control of the council brought up to a higher standard. There was no funding allocated for these schemes in the 2012 road works budget and Fine Gael councillors in the county committed to putting pressure on the Government to get the scheme back on the books for this year. A month ago, Minister of State Michael Ring announced that the LIS was back on board for this year, but the council would not be getting a separate block grant for these projects, but it could allocate seven per cent of its discretionary budget of €3.6 million to this purpose. This works out at around a €7,000 allocation per councillor in the chamber. The fact that there was no separate allocation made and it would have to come out of the council’s own resources has become a major bone of contention with opposition councillors and some government councillors calling for this to be changed.
At Wednesday morning’s meeting in Ballina, Fine Gael Cllr Jarlath Munnelly told the meeting that councillors could not do much work on LIS roads with that size of an allocation. “With the LIS we have to look at should we move the money back into public roads as we can do with it there, as it would be only very small work we could do on what are private roads.” His party colleague Cllr Seamus Weir said he disagreed with how the LIS schemes were to be funded, because the money was badly needed on county roads. “Maybe we should not go ahead with it, it’s so little money what would we get done?” he asked. Cllr Eddie Staunton echoed the idea that serious thought had to be put into putting the money back into county roads. While Fianna Fáil councillor Annie May Reape hit out at the way the LIS schemes were being proposed to be funded saying: “We need the money for LIS schemes, but the way it’s to be funded, it’s like a three card trick.” The members and the council executive will meet next week to work out the roadworks plan for the area.
