Waste of Ratepayers Money

I query the wisdom of sending four of our Councillors to a Sister Cities conference in Washington in July of this year. In my view such trips bring little or no direct benefit to the ratepayers of this Borough. While the links we established with Virginia Beach did result in a few low-key community exchanges - in addition to a number of official trips by Councillors- that link now appears to have fizzled out. This is after 10 years of traveling backwards and forwards at the ratepayer’s expense. There was a suggestion that a party of five Councillors might travel to Star City in Arkansas (anyone ever heard tell of it?) to explore establishing a further Sister City link. Fortunately common sense has prevailed and that suggestion has now been dropped.

I want to make it clear that I do not object to the very occasional trip abroad to raise the profile of the Borough - and that would normally be undertaken by the current Mayor. Neither would I object to well-organised schemes, which would lead to, genuine broadly based community exchanges between two areas with a common interest. Nor do I object to exchanges which would benefit our economy. Our efforts to achieve any to this to date have been less than completely successful and have largely consisted of exchange trips by Councillors