A word of warning when completing this consultation the council tell me that they cannot take into account additional cost as a reason to oppose this. So if you only mention costs on your consultation response it may be ignored, you must add more, perhaps bureaucracy or unnecessary additional staff or just object.
You will rightly ask what has that got to do with motorists? Hopefully nothing, but I remain suspicious regarding this council. These new councils will get their funds from a precept (an extra charge on your council tax). We don’t know what the precept will be. The reason is that until these are formed we don’t know what additional services they will provide, that will be up to the new town councillors. So we the people are being asked to pay for new unknown services with a new unknown cost. Only in Local Government this makes sense, the councillors assure me this is mandated by Central Government. They show the additional likely precepts on the consultation page, but they seem low to me. The average in England is £85. Link to Dorset’s is above.
It occurs to me that the council tell me that they have managed to get Central Government funding for all their Active Travel programme, running to over £90m for BCP and a further £2.3B for England. They even employ two additional full time members of staff who work on Active Travel. Given that Central Government has run out of our money it is quite likely that this funding will dry up, but the new precept could be used to fill the gap to create new, largely unused, cycling infrastructure that impedes motor traffic during it construction.
In short you are being asked to pay an additional amount to provide new unknown services, which may or may not include Active Travel. I have asked what the extra money will be used for but BCP don’t know, that’s down to the new councils.
If the BCP approve this proposal then your council tax will go up, how much by, we don’t know, to pay for what, we don’t know that either.