Caithness council duo press for review on funding
TWO Highland Councillors are calling for a rethink in the way the authority gives out grants.
The call from Independents Bill Fernie and Robert Coghill comes after they were among a group which unsuccessfully challenged Caithness and Sutherland area committee’s decision to award £10,000 to the RSPB to block up drains on the Flow Country. The notice of motion they supported was knocked back by the full council on Thursday by 40 votes to 27.
Mr Fernie said “We felt there was a lack of information contained in the application for the £10,000 from the council’s landfill community fund brought before the committee and we exercised proper scrutiny by questioning the use of public funds for such a project.
“In financially-constrained times like these, £10,000 is a huge sum and we have to ensure it is properly spent in a way that benefits as many people as possible.”
Mr Coghill said: “The drains will fill up naturally over time and so we couldn’t understand why the RSPB needed to spend £10,000 filling the drains with plastic when the money could be much better used elsewhere.”
Mr Fernie said: “Following the meeting, we did further research and found that RSPB is one of the wealthiest charities in the UK with assets in cash and investments of £33 million and an annual income in excess of £80 million.
“The application for £10,000 was for a project to block drains whose overall cost was £12,192, yet the RSPB was only contributing £2192 in kind so they were not contributing any money at all.
“The in-kind support from the charity was for their managers time who is paid by the charity anyway.”
For more on this story, read Wednesday’s Caithness Courier.