Tenbury in Bloom is the latest casualty of the dearth of available people. They no longer have enough capacity to mount a challenge for Gold.
The Town Council (although they made no reference to it at their meeting) seem only to have been able to field one new Councillor in place of the two Councillors who left.
A proposed Flood Action group will also need a considerable number of willing participants.
Posts
2 comments:
Tenbury has been over-reliant on volunteers for some time. One example is the Tourist Information Centre. In Tenbury this is run by volunteers. In Upton - a town with a smaller population - the Tourist Information Centre has paid staff. The fact that Upton's staff are (partly) paid out of the Council Tax collected in Tenbury just underlines the situation Tenbury is in - we have to pay 'them' to provide services in their town, but we have to work as volunteers to provide these services in our own town.
Tenbury needs more investment; it needs a proper share of the money that is out there. It needs enough 'staff' to provide all the basic services, then the volunteers will be able to direct their efforts into areas such as Tenbury in Bloom.
Tenbury's economy is starting to fall apart - look at the front page of the Tenbury Advertiser.
What investment has there been from "them" in the past few years? We have been flooded but no-one has come to help us. The only thing "they" seemed keen on was building a power station - for which a million pound "bung" was on offer, but at the same time, there was no money for our flood defences, no money to help the shops, pubs etc, and they even put the car park charges up!
Many people have been putting a brave face on things for too long: if local people say "we can cope" then local people will be left to get on with it. It is only by saying "we cannot cope" that Tenbury will get the help it needs.
I think that there is a right place and a wrong place to use volunteers.
I see no reason why (for instance) the Tenbury Flood Action Group shouldn't be a volunteer organisation, so long as they employ professionals when the need arises. The Town Council are all volunteers, and at last they seem to be employing professional assistance, such as the Landscape Architect who has suggested designs for the Burgage, which the Town Council wouldn't have dreamt up if they sat for a hundred years. It does seem strange that Upton's TIC are employed, yet Tenbury's are volunteers. There is always a danger that volunteers displace employment opportunities, but if all the services were to be provided by paid staff, then we the tax payer would face far higher taxes. I for one would prefer to spend a few hours a week volunteering, than spend them working only to have the money taken away in taxes.
In the current climate, it's not enough to stand and say 'we cannot cope' we have to say 'look at what we are achieving with Community Support but look how much more we could achieve with help'.
The Politicians that run the District, Country & National administrations would far sooner champion the successful than have any involvement with failure. This is why they always spin the positive.
The Biomass Power Station was a good example. It looked like a win win project, it appeared to tick the green box, the employment box, it attracted the right grants, all in all a winner. They were genuinely shocked by the adverse reaction locally and all the bad press. It didn't take long for them to start distancing themselves from the Project and even campaign against it. When the AWM announcement effectively killed it, the same administrations that were originally in favour started to take the credit for it's demise.
Post a Comment