10:00am Tuesday 7th September 2010
Several recent items in your news pages highlight the sheer incompetence of our local councillors.
First, the county council asks council taxpayers to tell it how to slash £200m over the next five years.
Even if we ignore the fact that councillors should be wise enough to know what should be done (as council leader Keith Mitchell keeps telling us they are), why should we believe that the council will take any notice of anything we say?
Time and again it has ignored our opinions on such matters as controlled parking and traffic schemes. Besides, the council might not be facing such huge debts if it had not wasted so much of our taxes on unworkable traffic plans. If it wants suggestions, how about losing all or most of the hopeless traffic department?
Secondly, you report that many drivers are ignoring the 20mph speed limit which the county council imposed on many Oxford roads.
This is hardly surprising, as 20mph is a ridiculously low speed to force on drivers. If drivers believe that limits are ridiculous, they tend to ignore them.
The chairman of the Oxford group of the Institute of Advanced Motorists said “It simply doesn’t work”. This is yet another scheme on which councillors wasted our money.
Thirdly, Oxford City Council bewails the fact that fewer people are using council-run car parks. Yet councillors have continually deterred drivers from entering Oxford by raising car park charges to unsustainable levels and conniving with the county council to make driving in Oxford more and more difficult.
It is even planning to close George Street, which will make it harder to drive around Oxford.
Most of our councillors seem hopelessly inadequate and short-sighted, which is surprising in a supposedly intelligent area like Oxfordshire.
If they can’t do a better job, perhaps we should just sack nearly all of them – and the overpaid council executives – thus saving a large amount of money that they take from us.
Tony Augarde, Carlton Road, Oxford
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