Forthcoming Attractions at the Jail Hill Odeon

The agenda for this month's meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council  on 11 February has been published, and once again it is very thin.

The most significant change is that, for the first time, the council will no longer "receive" reports from the various committees and scrutiny committees, and the minutes of their meetings are now merely provided "for information only".

Preventing discussion and questions about matters raised in the various committees has long been on the chief executive's agenda, and it will be remembered that his plan was to do away with them altogether and subject councillors and the public to corporate Powerpoint presentations by invited "partners" to tell us all what a wonderful job they are doing.

This latest change is another step towards the holy grail of turning meetings of the full council into what will be little more than a PR exercise. The idea that the County Council should be a forum, as the constitution says, "for the debate of matters of concern to the local community and the place at which councillors are able to hold the executive board and committee chairs to account" clearly has no place in modern, visionary local government.

As has now become standard, there are several questions from councillors on a variety of subjects including milk prices (important but nothing to do with the county council), the decision by the Tory Police Commissioner to stop funding CCTV cameras, and budget cuts to libraries, school transport, home care services and children with special educational needs.

Cllr Emlyn Dole's question has been partly pre-empted by the Executive Board's decision not to push ahead with plans to scrap school crossing patrols, meals on wheels and some other services.

This is all part of a tradition whereby council officers put forward the same old, tired proposals to slaughter the first born and slay the innocent every year. This is then followed by a highly publicised  session of the Executive Board which, after much hand-wringing, announces that some babes in arms will be spared, at least for the time being, and press releases rain down proclaiming that Kevin Madge, Pam Palmer and the rest have saved the world. Or at least Garnant and Abergwili.

Cllr Cefin Campbell notes that while some schools in Carmarthenshire are performing well under the Welsh Government's new categorisation scheme, a third are not and will be the subject of special measures and intervention.

Expect Labour's Keith Davies to reply reading very badly from a prepared statement, and possibly an intervention from Kevin Madge singing the praises of the council's Modernising Education Programme and Ysgol y Bedol in Garnant in particular, where he is chair of the board of governors.

Kev had a practice run at this the other day in the pages of the South Wales Guardian in a piece which managed to highlight Ysgol y Bedol while ignoring the problems the government identified in 32 other schools.

And finally, possibly the most interesting question of the day is one submitted by Cllr Siân Caiach about the unlawful pension pay supplement awarded by Kevin Madge and other members of the Executive Board to Mark James in November 2011. How much did the legal and consultancy advice cost the council, and who commissioned the various reports?

Perhaps someone will also be allowed to ask, as a follow-up question, who placed the proposal on the agenda of the Executive Board at that fateful meeting. According to the rules, it can only have been Mark James himself, or his old friend Meryl Gravell.

Blowing in the wind

Councillors, council staff and the poor old voters have been left blinking by Kevin Madge's latest political somersault.

Last month he used the South Wales Guardian to launch a PR blitz in response to growing public anger at the idea that the council's chief executive, Mark James, might get a huge pay-off to leave his job.

He had listened to council staff and public opinion, he said, and found that "the sense of feeling is ....very strong". The Labour group had therefore decided to support what he called the status quo option, which the Guardian was told would mean forcing James to remain in post or resign.

As public votes of confidence in a top public official go, that was hardly a resounding endorsement.

Roll forward a few weeks, and here is Kev in jubilant mood explaining that he is "delighted that Mark James has agreed to withdraw his application for severance this year and to remain in post as our Chief Executive for now to help the Council weather the financial and possible re-organisation storms".

Note the words "for now".

So Kevin Madge has gone for Plan B, which is to wait until all those difficult elections are out of the way before signing off on a massive redundancy package for the unpopular chief executive.

The new honeymoon is set to last roughly two years. 

Meanwhile, last month's rotting albatross is this month's must-have fashion accessory.

Delighted

It's K-K-K-K Ken!!

News in from Llanelli - Ken Rees the former LibDem county councillor, will be standing as Ukip's candidate for the general election in Llanelli.

Diolch i Lol