In Thursday Echo we had the front page How does your garden grow?. The article is about the Environment Protection Team taking four households to court over the state of their back gardens. All of them had been asked several times to sort them out, and finally the magistrates fined them over £150 each.
Hopefully other households in Lincoln will realise that the mess in your backgarden affects your neighbours and that the council have a right and a duty to sort it out.

Unfortunately for those in Lincoln (and very similar for those elsewhere in Lincolnshire), the 11.1% increase isn’t over 2 or 3 years. Nor is it calculated against the odd stealth local charge. Nope the figure of 11.1% is the actual increase in council tax on my bill right in front of me.
For this year Lincolnshire Police Authority have been fcked by the government and in return fcked every single council tax payer in the county.
Last year our band A house paid £87.72 to the police, this year it’s £156.90. That’s an increase of 78.9%. Seriously 78.9%! I now pay the police more than I pay the City Council (£147.84).
What seems to be worse is there is nothing we can do about it. If the county or city wanted to raise their portion by over 5% the government would stop them and if they didn’t at the next election the electorate might, but as far as I can see the police seem to be a law unto themselves.

I would like to thank those who elected me last year, and voted for me this year. However with the boundary changes and all-ups unfortunately both Heather and myself are no longer the councillors for Park Ward. The Liberal Democrats did avoid a complete wipe out with Helen Heath taking one of the Labour seats in Carholme Ward.
The Tories did what they promised all year and took control of the council from Labour with 17 councillors (up 6). There was bad luck for Claire Metcalfe (Con) who got elected with me last year, she came 4th in Glebe, losing out to her 18 year old daughter Charlotte (Con) who came 1st and I wish Sandra Gratrick (Con) the best of luck next year having to stand for the third year in a row even though she’s been elected twice.
This years other losers were: Steve Allnutt (Lab); Lesley Rose (Lab); Larry Wells (Lab); Morris Cookson (Lab) and Geoff Ellis (Lab)

One of the big arguments against fortnightly collection is vermin. Now in Lincoln fortnightly collection came in with the wheelie bins.
Which of the two pictures below do you believe would result in more rats?

It seems that Flames of Lincoln have decided to go to the press over the decision by the Development Control Committee to part reject their retrospective planning application for external signs.
Now whilst I don’t have a problem with the actual signs, I do believe that they have too many, especially the vee-board over the window. Also the key point behind the rejection of the signs was that we have a City wide policy on signage. The owners should wander down the High Street to see how this policy has been applied.
Now if Flames of Lincoln had come to the council before putting up the signs we wouldn’t have had a problem. However instead they were put up without any permission and now wonder why they are being asked to take them down.

A small panic yesterday. I started to play about with Live Local plotting the 12 candidates for Park Ward, when a colleague asked where were I? Only at this point (about an hour after printing out the list) that I realised my name wasn’t there.
A quick email to the deputy returning officer and a reply within minutes apologised for the error, pointed out that they had already spotted it and were just uploading the new list.
Phew!

Well the papers are in and have been verified, and assuming I don’t pull out I’ll be facing re-election for Park Ward this May. Due to us having boundary changes I only got one year as being a councillor, and there is the possibility that if I get the 3rd largest vote I’ll be up again next year! Good luck to all the other LibDems from across the country, including my better half Heather Quinton, who will be joining me in defending Park with our good friend Stephen Morgan.

Today at full council the Liberal Democrat group refused to vote for the budget. The only reason for doing this was because the budget arrived on our doorstep on Friday 2nd March, after we had already departed for a weekend in Harrogate.
We found it totally unacceptable that such a serious document which was between 150-200 sides of A4 was sent out as an “item to follow”. If the controlling Labour group expect a debate, an amendment or even an alternative budget we expect next time to receive the paper at least two weeks in advance.
We had also decided that under the same reasoning, if the opposition Tory group had submitted or proposed any changes that this too would be voted against.
Several Labour councillors failed to understand our position, believing somehow that the few consultation sessions to decide what priorities should be made are equivalent to analysing the full and complete paper.
Let’s hope that next year, whoever is in control that we can have a serious debate about how we are to spend the tax payers’ money, by ensuring that everyone has a full chance to read and discuss the proposals with the relevant officers and political groups.

A follow-up to the post on Sunday regarding the black bags in Park Ward which are still on the streets. I’ve got an email from the officers informing me that they should be disposed of tomorrow.

Subject: RE: FW: Fly Tipping/Posting: 03224017
In an effort to look through all of these bags they were left in the street until an Enforcement Officer had looked through them all for evidence. This has now happened - a few addresses have been found and action will be taken. I have now told Cory that the bags can be collected and this will happen as part of the full cleanse of the street tomorrow.

I’ll just have to wait and see.

After an email to the council on Thursday evening and with the rubbish still out on Saturday, I decided en route to the High Street I would take photographic evidence of the fly-tipping problem I’ve got not only in my ward, but metres from my house.

For over 10 weeks now we’ve been using wheelie bins in Park Ward, as the majority of the house have small alleyways we have two 120 litre bins. A brown one for recycling which is collected every other week (and if that’s full you can leave more to the side if it’s clearly recyclable waste) and a black one for landfill waste which is collected every week, but no side waste. This includes black bags which are no longer collected, however it seems that some households in Park Ward just don’t care and continue to dump and allow others to dump black bags outside their houses.