Gurnites might recall this week’s
Nairnshire Telegraph and the picture of the overgrown Community garden at McLean Court. The
headline read “Resident’s wrath over garden neglect and included a picture of
the overgrown community garden. The Nairnshire detailed the problems:
”When a Nairnshire reporter visited McLean Court
last Friday it appeared that grassed areas had been cut. However planters full
of shrubs showed signs of neglect and paved areas were infested with weeds.”
The Gurn has since spoken to an unreliable source close to prominent members of
West Community Council who told the Gurn that the Westies had been so
exasperated by the neglect of McLean
Court that they had
instructed a professional gardener to sort it and had set aside £200 for that
purpose. The gardener turned up on the Monday morning to find a hit squad of
five council employees hard at work. The west watchdogs are to still contribute
£200 however and are consulting the residents as to how the money could be
spent improving the garden. Was the Council shamed into action by the
Nairnshire asking questions in the background or was it all part of routine
maintenance? Perhaps we’ll never know but it seems there have been a lot of
complaints raised according to the Nairnshire report.
Gurnites must remember that the number of
Council manual workers has been almost halved in recent years, down from 41 to
21 according to one observer so we are now left with a squad that more or less
reacts to problems that occur rather than getting there in the first place to
prevent those problems occurring.
The Gurn’s solution or attempt at a move in the right direction would be to
bring the grass cutting back under council control when the present contract
runs out in one year. There still exists in the Council squad a nucleus of
employees who have the skills, knowledge and pride in the job to go out look
after things if they were given the chance and a little additional manpower. They
know where things are and they know what needs to be done. Thus they need the
minimum of management – pay a manager off instead of workers? They also would
be able to train up new employees (either full or part-time but recruited
locally) and install the same esprit de corps that they themselves still
possess. There’s still a chance to turn things back a little, perhaps the new
regime will have another look at the contract costings and see if we can have a
local solution to the problems forced on us by the former centralising administration
that was only 16 miles away but so often felt so, so much further from our
needs and aspirations.
