Smalltown and Dullbridge Town Council White Elephant Enclosure Mismanagement Committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow when the Councillors present are due to discover the answer to the burning question ‘What is a White Elephant Enclosure?’.
However, despite the Local Government Act making it a legal requirement that the ‘Agenda for meetings of the parish council and its committees should be circulated and made available to the public a minimum of 3 clear days before the day of the meeting. Current best practice is distribution 5 or 7 clear days before the meeting. A clear day does not include the day of the notice and the day of the meeting and excludes weekends and bank holidays‘, the agenda has not yet been published.
SaD Town Council regularly flout this ‘clear 3 day rule’, with agendas generally being published on the Thursday for a meeting held on a Monday – which is only 1 clear day (Friday) before the meeting takes place (as has been the case with tonight’s SaDTC Finance and Misappropriation Committee Meeting).
However, the current transgression with the WEE agenda is even worse. Even with SaDTC’s lax interpretation of the rules, the agenda should have been published on Friday, giving today (Monday) as SaD Town Council’s aagainst-the-rules 1 clear day between agenda publication and meeting. Yet nothing has been forthcoming.
It is the duty of the Proper Officer, in this case the Smalltown Administration Guru (SAG) Katie Global, to ensure that SaDTC complies with the Local Government Act, and it should be hoped that she knows the rules, so quite why the agenda has not been made available to the public is a mystery. Certainly, it is unlikely that this would have happened if the previous Smalltown Head Administration Guru, Tanya Winter, was still in charge. The majority of SaD Councillors can not be blamed, as none of them have bothered to read the Local Government Act and therefore have no idea what the correct course of action is.
It is possible that the meeting has been cancelled, although no notice of a cancellation has been published either.
Therefore a more likely explanation is that this could be yet another example of WEE Mismanagement Chair, Deputy Dictator Cllr Eugenie Sherry’s ‘Open, Honest and Transparent’ approach to meetings. A policy which she introduced as Chair of the Human Resources Top Secret Committee Meetings, with all HR Top Secret meetings now taking place behind closed doors and with no agendas or minutes published at all..
It is, of course, to be hoped that a copy of the agenda has been circulated to the Committee members, so that they will at least know what they will be discussing tomorrow night, but the lack of the agenda being published on the Town Council website means that members of the public will not have enough time to register to speak at the meeting, nor will they be party to the venue for the meeting or the time at which it starts. A move possibly designed to prevent members of the public from turning up and criticising any new plan to improve attendance numbers at the WEE – if indeed there is a new plan to improve attendance numbers at the WEE. Previous WEE Mismanagement meetings have seen residents give their open and honest opinions on SaDTC wasting just under a million pounds of council tax payers money on the failing venue, so a desire by the committee to keep the next meeting top secret is understandable.
As such it remains to be seen if the WEE Top Secret Mismanagement Committee will be discussing the Top Secret outcome of the Top Secret Consultants, employed on a Top Secret basis for a Top Secret fee, have come up with a conclusion and are able to explain exactly what a WEE is, or whether the answer is to be kept Top Secret.