Council Receives €10m Less From Department Of Environment To Serve Needs Of 47,000 More People

15th January 2006, Press Release

Local Authorities are not allowed to increase the amount of people working for them and some are grossly under funded according to Independent TD Catherine Murphy, she has stated that these are the fundamental causes for the situation where 19000 houses in Kildare alone are not having their maintenance needs met by either Local Authority or Developer. "Counties such as Meath, Kildare, South Dublin and Fingal who have absorbed the bulk of recent population increases are simply not being resourced to deal with the consequences of that growth. They need to be allowed increase their staffing levels, they need a larger annual budget, and they need them now" demanded Murphy.

Kildare County Council’s 2005 Annual Budget to service its population of 164,000 people, was €27million. However compared to counties Mayo (pop 117,000) and Galway (pop 143,000) with respective budgetary allocations of €38million and €37million Kildare’s funding levels are visibly inadequate. The huge difference in budgetary allocation, according to Murphy, is in part a testament to the expanding populations of counties such as Dublin, Kildare and Meath which are not being taken into account when the Minister’s Department administers it’s Local Government fund. "While Kildare is not very well provided for it’s not the worst off", stated Murphy "South Dublin County Council has to provide for 239,000 inhabitants on €26million per year from the fund. No wonder we’re seeing problems such as failure to take housing estates in charge crop up when these Local Authorities are not being adequately provided for."

Staffing levels are also a cause for concern according to Murphy, a staff embargo currently prohibits all Local Authorities from increasing the numbers of staff in their employment. Meath County Council employed 700 people in 2004 to serve the needs of its 133,000 inhabitants. In contrast Kerry, with an almost identical population, had 1217 staff in the same year. "This accounts for a significantly different level of service provision, with the census of population due to be taken in 2006 I predict under provision for growing populations will be even more apparent" according to Murphy.

1365 people were employed by South Dublin County Council in 2004 to serve a population of 239,000 people, this equates to 1 staff member per 175 people however Galway (pop 143,000 staff 1002) averaged 1 staff member for 109 people. Murphy, who criticized the embargo as a significant barrier to service provision, states "it’s a very crude way of reducing or stabilizing staffing levels on a national level as it doesn’t take account of local trends such as significant population increases or decreases. It also fails to account for the management needs of rapidly expanding communities."

Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche referred to the huge intake by local authorities of Development Levies which are an additional source of Local Authority Funding. Those levies are collected on new housing, industrial and commercial developments in order that sewage, water, roads / paths, and community facilities can be provided to facilitate increased demands. Department of the Environment, according to Murphy, no longer fully funds many capital projects such as sewage treatment plants but requires a sizeable local contribution. "Too often the criticism has been essential facilities have lagged behind housing development, creating collections of houses rather than communities, these levies are intended to partly deal with that problem, they are however significantly short of what is needed. For the Minister to infer they could be used to remediate unfinished housing estates abandoned by the original developer goes against the rules set down by his own Department for the use of these levies" declared Murphy. She concluded in saying "It is clear that unless Minister Roach accepts there is a funding problem for Local Authorities we won’t see a solution in the foreseeable future."

ENDS

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Posted by catherinemurphy on January 15, 2006. Filed under Your Home & You. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.