by Trevor Bevins, Local Democracy Reporter.
Among the additional spending in Dorset Council’s £483million budget for the year ahead will be an extra £5m to target flooding.
The additional money, along with £250,000 to create a new road gully cleaning team, has been injected into the budget as a response to the recent floods.
In the coming financial year a total of £48million will be spent on the county’s roads – a record sum.
Finance portfolio holder Cllr Simon Clifford said the money would be used by the highways team to target areas which repeatedly flood.
He told councillors that the council had no choice but to put up council tax to the maximum 4.99 per cent – or risk losing £24million of Government funding.
He was critical of the Government for ‘punishing’ Dorset for being a rural authority with an elderly population and seasonal fluctuation – its calculations, he claimed, failing to take any of those factors into account and leaving Dorset council taxpayers to find 93per cent of the authority’s spending.
He said the increased council tax would mean an extra £150 a year for most households – but would see £12million more going into adult social care and £5m more into children’s services.
In addition the council has a £350m capital programme over the next 5 years for spending on big projects, including the new £18m household recycling centre at Blandford and £8m on making the road at Dinah’s Hollow safe. There is also extra money for coast protection and other road improvements.
Cllr Clifford said new financial controls would mean that any spending of above £2,500 would now have to be signed off by a corporate director – a nod to the financial problems which saw a whole team of interim staff sacked and has led to a police fraud investigation.
Conservative group leader Cllr Andrew Parry described the Lib Dem budget as “high risk” claiming it was “fraught with difficulties and likely to fail.”
He was critical of the council’s use of £30million from reserves and said that some services, including bin collections, were beginning to show signs of failing, while the administration remained dismissive of the east and north of the county.
“Two years into your administration it is time to be weaned off the “tax to the max’” mantra .. and instead, usher in a culture of ‘on time and on budget’.
“There is more chance of Kier Starmer still being Prime Minister at the end of this year than you have of delivering this budget,” he said.
