Plight of city businesses is too important to play politics

I would have thought that in his six years on the council, Cllr. William Leathem would have familiarised himself with the Council Committee system. Each chairman is responsible for the expenditure of his own committee and the full council then has to ratify the joint budget.

During my term as chairman of Corporate Services it was not my committee which hiked the rates up by 8%, but the rocketing expenditure of the Environmental Services committee. In fact the committee and the council had no option but to pay the huge sums involved in the closure of the Drumlough dump, the additional cost of sending our landfill to a Belfast City council site and the landfill tax introduced by the Labour government. These expenditures were never challenged by any DUP member of the Environmental Services Committee as they knew bills had to be met.

To accuse me of playing politics with the rates issue demonstrates how out of touch Cllr. Leathem is with our City Centre businesses.

In the last couple of weeks two more businesses have closed on the Cross Row and I have met many of the retail proprietors who tell me that the rates burden is becoming unsustainable. Some of them are paying more for their rates than they are for their rent.

The only way the Council can help is by reducing or freezing the rates and my major concern is to save our existing businesses from closure.

Cllr Leathem follows a very dangerous path when he seeks to elevate the influence of the chairman of Corporate Services above that of his fellows, because it is that Committee, chaired by him, which has presided over the sale of the land at Ballymacoss Hill, valued at £9 million in March 2007 and sold this month for £2.5 million as a result of the delay in selling it to one single preferred bidder, the NIHE.

If he accepts personal responsibility for that loss I may well have to label him ‘Wasteful William’!

Cllr Ronnie Crawford