Clive Hart Thanet District Council’s Leader Resigns, some further thoughts about this one.

First the why did he resign question. Well the last great fuss has been over the 1,000 houses planed on the disused bit of Manston Airport, as reported by the Gazette http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Plans-1-000-homes-Manston-airport-discussed/story-21083143-detail/story.html

My take here is that it really can’t have been this, it’s an old story and has been on the airport’s website since last July, see http://www.manstonairport.com/userfiles/files/planning/Airport-Commission/Manston-Airport-Response---Long-Term-Proposals-190713.pdf the relevant bit being:

“An Airport ‘Campus’ development sitting outside but adjacent to the Airport, potentially comprising: a mix of B1, B2 and B8 development of 1.0-1.5m sq ft, tertiary education facilities including an aviation/aerospace training academy, 2-3 hotels and possibly a modest conference/trade-hall/exhibition space and PFS; an integrated airport village incorporating a small village/campus centre of convenience shop units, a small ‘express’ style supermarket, pub, crèche, GP surgery/dentist and a combination of student accommodation – 500 units, 300 low cost houses for rent and 700 houses for sale; a factory outlet park offering up to 250,000 sq ft of units;”

I expect it has also been on the council website for all this time, but how anyone finds anything there is a mystery to me.

I guess it may be the EKO enquiry, cover-up attempt and so on.

I guess it could be all Ian Driver’s fault, which seem to be what Clive was saying on FaceBook.

It could the peer review.

It could be the independent standards committee.

I guess the next question is who next?

So what would I do if I was a member of either of the two main political groups.

Let’s start with the Conservatives, frankly I don’t think they have a cat in hells chance of getting one of their own elected as leader as the figures don’t stack up: There are 56 Councillors in total.   The political composition is:  26, Labour Group; 23 Conservative Group; 3, Independent Group; 2, Thanet Independent Group; and 2, UKIP.

This leaves something tactical, but what?

I think the answer here is for the Conservative Group to put up Will Scobie and vote for him, after all it would put Labour in a very difficult position and after Will had been leading TDC for a year I would guess that the Conservatives would have a reasonable chance of getting their candidate in at the general election.

Who will labour put up? Well the cabinet is made up of Clive Hart, Rick Everitt, Michelle Fenner, David Green, Iris Johnston and Alan Poole, Clive won’t be standing, so there are the probables.

I guess a big problem would be is there anyone who would either accept the existing chief executive or who would survive for any length of time if they did. I should point out here that the council’s leader doesn’t have to accept the chief executive and can select one from the other council officers.  

All this does really beg the question is there really any councillor at the council who is up to being leader and could get us out of this mess?

It further begs the question is there really any officer at the council who is up to being chief executive and could get us out of this mess?

Can the office for local government put a council into special measures and bring in some experts to sort the problem out.

There is of course the elected leader option, the council did hold a public consultation about this although they held it very secretly the few voters and local taxpayers who found it said unanimously that they would prefer to elect the leader themselves.

The pictures illustrating the post show what happens when someone opens the sluice gates too far.

Webwise the council seem to have just noticed that their leader has resigned and have put up a page on their website http://thanet.gov.uk/the-thanet-magazine/news-articles/2014/may/cllr-hart/ their communications team tweeted the resignation information at 4.50 pm, which seems to show how on the ball they are.    

I suppose that while on one hand the council goes on with the ordinary tasks of emptying the rubbish, sweeping the streets looking after the parks and public gardens and so on, on the other some peculiar detachment from reality has occurred.

It’s only about a week since the council’s solicitor and monitoring officer left under somewhat unusual circumstances, there has been no press release explaining this or how his replacement has been managed.

Then today the leader of the council resigns and the only press release the council issues is about an award they have won for Margate sea defence http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/flood-defence-steps-capture-town-pride.html

It is as though at some level up the council officer ladder the officers have lost all sense of reality, all desire to communicate with the population they are supposed to serve and have gone into a clandestine conclave where they work out how they can maintain some sense of purpose divorced from normal reality.

I will endeavour to add to this post given time and a few more ideas.   

Thanet District Council’s Secret Public Consultation.

More efforts by the council to rig the leadership consultation keep on coming out, the latest information being that they didn’t even tell the councillors that they were holding the consultation.

The video of the meeting is very short and you can watch councillor Johnston saying that she hadn’t been informed of the consultation by council officers, but instead found out from the local paper when the consultation was practically over, that it had apparently been going on for some time.

The video to click on, is the top one, on the page at http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council_meeting_webcast.aspx considering that this meeting is about the future constitution of the council, watching it is an education in local democracy at work.

The council have finally managed to get both council meetings available on the internet, perhaps this had something to do with yesterday’s post, perhaps they were going to do it anyway.

As one would expect the council have opted to host the video files in difficult format, expensive for them and not easy for those with older computers. They have published them in a way that you can’t save them and view them at your leisure, they have also disabled the size expansion facility so you can only view them as thumbnails, presumably to make them as boring as possible, so people will be put off from watching them and the council can say that there was insufficient public interest and bring the whole project to a halt.

Why they didn’t publish them in ordinary video format to one of the free video sites like Youtube one can only guess at.

The one of the extraordinary meeting will form part of my complaints to various organisations, like the electoral commission, if you need it for this sort of purpose you can download it and save it to your pc by clicking on the following link http://www.thanet.gov.uk/files/ExtraordinaryCouncil.flv if you need any help opening it or converting it to a normal video file let me know. I haven’t bunged it up on Youtube as the council have published it with a copyright statement that I don’t want to infringe.

If you prefer to view the main council meeting video files this way and have overcome the technological problems with the file above, here is the one for the much longer main meeting http://www.thanet.gov.uk/files/webcast.flv 413mb so not that large.