SQUANDERING TAX PAYERS MONEY IN A RECESSION?

If you thought this item was going to be about Labour MPs squandering tax-payers money, you were wrong. This item is all about Conservatives at KCC and TDC squandering £millions already and continuing to waste tax-payers money in gay abandon as we sit in the worst recession since the 1930s.
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As we see Chipperfield's new Turner Gallery start to arise on a wave swept promenade this week, utilising a £1,000,000 'road improvement' to Fort Hill as its building site, it is perhaps timely to remember that it is not only Westminster's MPs who squander tax payers money in a criminal manner.
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The aborted TC in the sea cost us over £6 million and KCC continues to waste our money in a sad attempt to pursue a claim against Snohetta that has cost us already over £600,000 in legal fees. We have had a Director of a non-existent gallery on the payroll since 2001 and we are now in the second year with a curator of a non-existent collection in a non-existent gallery. We have had £millions squandered on an M&S building that has fewer visitors than our closed museums had and a current wage bill for a gallery that has yet to be built of £427,000 per annum.
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If you missed a snippet from our esteeemed IOTG of 21 April 2009, let me enlighten you. It is expected that staff costs for our Chipperfield TC will need to rise to £750,000 per year or more. Why?
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Apparently TC needs a marketing manager, a finance officer, a formal learning officer, an informal learning officer and a press and marketing assistant. With re-possessions in Thanet rising and our un-employment figures going past 4,000, it is comforting to realise that KCC and TDC are happy to tap into Arts Council (Tax payer funded) grant funding but cannot find any money for our museums.
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The assumption that the TC will carry on receiving its unending tax-payer funding stream when David Cameron and the Conservative Party will have some harsh decisions to make in the near future about the waste in present Government expenditure and try and put the finances of the Nation back in some order, is optimistic. (Don't our troops in Afghanistan need more helicopters?)
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The problem that will face us as TDC Council tax-payers in the very near future is that we will most likely have to pay for this ghastly scheme ourselves. With a projected visitor level of 130,000 and a wage bill in excess of £750,000 you do not need the brains of a fiddling MP to realise that the whole project is economically unsound.
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Let me leave you , not with an excellent quote from IOTG's Plain Jane this week, but with a comment from our new TDC Cabinet Member, Dr Simon Moores from Thanet Life in 2004:
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"Why the fiscally challenged planners at Kent County Council in conjunction with Thanet Council, believe that opening a gallery in a famous artist’s name, with none of his paintings on display, will suddenly transform Margate into a cultural Mecca and attract hordes of cultural day-trippers is anyone’s guess. It’s all rather like the fiasco of positioning the Royal Armouries in Leeds and not London with the net result that it’s losing money hand over fist because nobody wishes to visit Leeds when it’s cheaper and easier to visit sites such as the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
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£20 million pounds for the Turner Centre means higher poll tax bills for the local population, already double that I paid in London last year and £20 million wasted, when it could have been put to much better use on other schemes, such as revitalising the crumbling façade of Margate seafront or knocking down the clock tower traffic lights; another one of the council's universally despised "bright ideas". What comes next I wonder, the "Hanging Gardens of Cliftonville"?
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A prophetic, sharp, analytical mind being addressed to a problem 5 years ago, that is shortly to become a reality?