Leader of the local BeFuddled Party, Cllr Banish Barracuda has waded into the row over the Mayor and Deputy Mayor making decisions on their own, prior to matters being discussed by Smalltown and Dullbridge Town Council.
In a statement, which was written during a secret meeting held with Headmistress and Mayor, Cllr Dullard, together with her Deputy Headmistress and Deputy Mayor, Cllr Sherry, the trio agreed the following wording, with Cllr Barracuda chosen as Top Prefect and asked to send it out to local news outlets.
That Statement in FULL.
‘All very heated here isn’t it? Can I suggest that some of you calm down before you end up taking some time out on the naughty step, where you will be expected to reflect on your behaviour.
I’ m sorry about the length of this but Cllr Dullard has helped me write it, and you know how she drones on. We are going to make one attempt to explicitly set the record straight, and this will hopefully close down the more fatuous amongst you, so listen very carefully.
To start I would like to say that SaD Town council is explicitly committed to the public drop-in sessions which we hold prior to each Full Town Council meeting and where residents are encouraged to come along between the hours of 12-1pm (closed for lunch 12-2pm) to discuss items on the meeting agenda. Obviously, we don’t publish the agenda prior to the meeting, so only Councillors who may have been given an advance copy of the agenda should bother to turn up.
This initiative, which one of the Councillors who has been criticised here insisted on introducing, despite the Smalltown New Administration Guru pointing out thar the agendas wouldn’t be available in time, is still developing but we will have more opportunity to listen if people use these meetings to have their say. This will also save us having to discuss matters which concern residents outside of these hours.
Next, let’s understand that the two people you are talking about are councillors with homework to do and votes to cast, regardless of their positions as mayor and deputy mayor, despite those roles meaning that in their heads they are better than any of the other councillors because they have those titles.
I can also say that none of these things are done in isolation – BeFuddled councillors consult with their colleagues within the BeFuddled group during secret meetings held before Committee meetings. No councillor would actually bring a proposal to Council or a committee if they didn’t believe they had support or that it needed to be discussed in greater detail to justify the proposal. That would be pointless.
Do we talk amongst ourselves and with the SNAG before a meeting to work out what is likely to be supported? Of course we do – other than for Planning Committee where it is explicitly not allowed.
Nowhere does it state that we can’t arrive at a meeting having predetermined the outcome and being unwilling to listen to any alternative views (apart from in Section 25 of the Localism Act 2011, which clearly states that ‘a decision maker is not to be taken to have a closed mind when making the decision just because the decision-maker had previously done anything that directly or indirectly indicated what view the decision-maker took or might take in relation to that matter’.)
Nobody acted beyond their powers and no single councillor has dominated a vote. On both the specific issues which have been talked about, I can be clear that the BeFuddled group explicitly agreed we would not take a party line and that we would have a free vote, although the Mayor did tell us that we would have to vote for the proposal she put forward in regard to the tree, because she’d already agreed matters with The All-New-Yet-Unimproved Somerset Cuonty Council and had sought their approvement for her own alternative suggestion.
Regarding the White Elephant Enclosure – we had collectively recognised that the money committed this year can’t be sustained so we had already explicitly agreed that we needed to do something about it. This included a review of staffing as recommended by the Finance and Misappropriation Committee and accepted by the WEE Committee, chaired by Cllr Sherry.
Following the departure of the Smalltown Culture and Arts Manager (SCAM) we realised that we had some money in our budget and we could afford to bring in some outside bodies to help. The matter was referred to the HR Committee, chaired by Councillor Sherry, and was a topic for discussion during an HR Committee meeting which was so secret that only Cllr Sherry attended. No agenda, date or time for this meeting was published.
And yes there has been an interesting and serious approach regarding the theatre and it should get a fair hearing. But as Cllr Sherry explained we felt that we should be explicit about what we actually want the WEE to be and how much we expect residents to have to pay for it.
Regarding the ‘Dangerous’ Tree. This wasn’t just one councillor. Several of us also read the correspondence from the All-New-Yet-Unimproved Somerset Cuonty Council to ensure that some proper analysis was done before a decision was finalised and they offered us a couple of options. I looked at the report as did at least three other councillors including Kelsey. We all came to the same conclusion which is that we couldn’t justify spending the money to maintain the tree, when we could use the same sum to keep the WEE open for three weeks.
We didn’t bother to engage with the community on this to explain the situation or give them the chance to suggest alternatives. Instead Cllr Dullard came up with some of her own ideas. That was the vote taken at Council. Please don’t think that our vote failed to consider arguments that had been put to us on both sides, we simply didn’t bother to ask nor hear any of the alternative arguments.
Nothing I have read since the last council meeting has given me any cause for concern. All of us involved in voting on both these issues had definitely not decided in advance how we were going to vote on these issues, and the proposals most definitely did not explicitly suggest that we had talked it over beforehand and agreed what we were going to do before the meeting.
As I mentioned previously predetermination would mean that we had decided how we were going to vote at the meeting before we held the meeting and had previously come up with and agreed to alternatives before the meeting. Despite this being exactly what we did I’m going to say we didn’t and that, even if we did, it doesn’t matter because we’ve done it now.”
Note to Editors:
- This statement has been issued by Cllrs Barracuda, Dullard and Sherry on behalf of the BeFuddled Party
- Cllr Dullard is available for any and all photo opportunities.