2023 annual town meeting

This year’s annual town meeting was less exciting than the previous one. It wasn’t very interesting. Amidst the dullness, however, there were a few highlights. The biggest was an attempt to discuss the latest STC scandal- rumours of illegally buried asbestos on STC-owned land.

Don’t hold your breath-this matter was quickly dismissed with the statement that this would be ‘clarified’. But, of course, no details emerged- who, where, why, who should suffer the consequences. These kinds of questions are not a priority at the STC. Councillors were more interested in who released this information and why.

I saw this thread on Facebook, but I need more time to look closely at the discussions on that page. I have a link to this thread; if I find the time, I will write more about it.

Once again, someone treats our town and council like their business rather than the common good. I expect that, like all other scandals, this matter will be swept under the carpet. I am more than sure that no one will suffer the consequences.

FINANCES
All is good! When discussing financial matters, none of the councillors present had a question. Not a single question, despite the fact that the council had not reviewed the cash book for five months.

Fortunately– the cash book is a public document, so I will ask STC to provide copies of any cash book I don’t have. If I find anything interesting there, I will describe it in the article.

AUDIT
Another curiosity is the problems with conducting an audit. Civil servants are having problems contacting the auditor who has conducted audits so far. Perhaps this person has realised that he or she has ‘accepted’ documents with mathematical errors in previous years and has no desire to make another embarrassing slip-up.

Anyway- this year, we will wait a little longer for the audit, which will delay the publication of the cyclical article in which I compared the financial results of all councils in the region (if you want to see the data for the previous two years, look for the articles “Money, money, money”- there are several of them).

NEW/OLD CHAIR, OLD HABITS
Chris Kane was re-elected as Chair of STC- despite an ongoing investigation for eight months into his breach of the code of conduct. Not a word was mentioned about this either.

Interestingly- Chris Kane achieved the worst result in his ward of all elected councillors. Despite this- there was not a single person willing to show that the Chair’s duties could be done better. This is sad.

PLANS FOR FUTURE
Apart from announcing the schedule of events that the Leisure Centre will organise in the near future-not a word about new STC initiatives.

The Crematorium has been mentioned– there is still no date for the start of construction, but if construction does start, the expected completion time has been set at one and a half years.

NEW COUNCILLORS AND ATTENDANCE LIST
We have some new councillors. I do not know these people. I know from experience that new councillors need at least a few meetings to put themselves to work and understand what is going on around them. I wonder whether they have received training or whether they joined the job completely unprepared like I did in the previous term.

I will try to continue to write down data comparing the attendance of individual councillors at meetings, but as I have always omitted attendance at Annual Town Meetings- I will do the same this time.

VOTING
All votes were unanimous. The compositions of the various committees have changed slightly, but as these are of minor importance (100% Labour), I will not publish them. If anyone is interested, I recommend a search on the township website.

DOCUMENTS
Of course, I do not have access to any documents, so I do not know what was in them. Nor can I present any audio excerpts. I will also have great difficulty in presenting audio excerpts – I have nowhere to put the laptop on which I usually record proceedings, and the recordings I make on my phone are in some strange format that my computer does not understand, so I have to convert them each time, which takes a lot of time. Plus, the size of these recordings is monstrous, and the transfer takes a lot of time. So I will continue to record meetings, but instead of snippets of audio recordings, I will present a transcript of the recording on my phone if necessary.

MORE OF THE SAME
This meeting was a harbinger of what is to come over the next four years. The scandals will be swept under the carpet. The town clerk will not answer any questions about her mistakes because Labour will protect her. The town’s financial situation doesn’t matter because if Labour spends all the money, they will do what they always do – raise taxes. Residents will continue to be squeezed like a lemon.

HIGHEST IN THE COUNTRY?
I posted a query on Reddit to UK residents about their council tax levels. I got 120 responses, and the whole thread had over 800 posts, so the discussion was lively. I knew we had high taxes, but I didn’t expect us to pay more than Londoners. Yes- you read that right. A Shirebrook resident pays more taxes than Londoners.

None, I repeat, none of the people who responded paid more tax than I did. The only answer with a higher figure was for band D, and that was only by £20. Even funnier was the fact that a resident living in a ‘band d’ house in Doncaster paid £200 less than I did in a ‘band c’ house in Shirebrook.

This is just a reminder that if Labour pushes through the idea of building a swimming pool, our taxes could rise by up to 100%. Aha- the results of the “referendum” were not given. Because why should they?

BLACK CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON
The issue of Sportdirect moving out has also not been raised. I guess it’s time for me to raise this topic because if you are thinking of buying a house in Shirebrook- you should know that property prices in Shirebrook will get cheaper soon. If Mike Ashley moves out of Shirebrook- our town will turn into a ghost town.

Older residents remember what happened when an employer providing work for 800 people (the mine) disappeared overnight. Think what will happen when an employer giving jobs to 3,000 people disappears. It will be a bloodbath.

Sylwester Zwierzynski

• there was also something about asbestos scandal. It was not mine information and apparently it wasn’t the true.