Swindon Elections - Is Dale's Dream Dead?

Remember it being said that councillors who get hold of their own library end up moaning about litter in the rain?

For Dale Heenan, it appears to have just started lashing down.

Covingham Parish Council are no longer willing to part-fund Covingham Library run by Dale's trust. From reading the Parish meeting minutes from January, it seems the Parish was under the impression their funding was to allow the Trust to get on it's feet and eventually be self-funding (or maybe through monies from elsewhere). This does not seem to have come to fruition, and a request for funding for the 2019/20 year from the Parish for the library was received. Not only that, the Library Trust requested an increase of a thousand pounds on the amount it received from the Parish in previous years.

With lack of accurate usage figures for Covingham Library, the Parish have not been able to work out if they are getting value for money and therefore have stopped their funding.

As you can imagine, Dale is not happy, as seen in this part of one of his election leaflets from this month.

It seems there was a reaction from the local community to the news, but it was rather muted. According to the March Parish Council minutes, two residents asked questions in person, and four emails on the topic were received (one of them from a Friends of Covingham Library member).

It's quite telling that the Swindon Community Library Trust (set-up to takeover Covingham Library and Liden Library when the Borough Council withdrew their own funding) has a website that has not been updated for nearly a year (the last news story being about a beer festival in June 2018). 

Things seem to have gone full-circle, with the quiet news that the Borough Council has decided to keep it's main 5 libraries as Borough Council entities and to not create a charitable trust to run them. The Borough Council seem to have realised that keeping the main libraries centralised allows them to be easier to run and meet council aims. A startlingly vibrant revelation indeed, but a boringly sensible and right decision none the less.

Where does this leave the libraries run by the Trust? Only Dale can answer that. But he's busy in the town centre, appearing to suggest that if people vote other than Tory at this week's local elections they risk causing Debenhams to close. 

That's quite a desperate and daft suggestion (Maybe Tories in Wroughton and Wichelstowe are using the same tactic, suggesting to their voters that a Lib Dem victory will cause Waitrose to walk away from Middle Wichel?) . But considering he said in the same story that the Oasis ski slope is to be in the town centre (the site at North Star is not in the town centre, it's in North Star), it seems his grasp of geography is like his grasp of library funding, not quite to scale.

Has anyone checked the maths on the Dale idea of selling off the Civic Offices plan to pay for the new museum and art gallery and Wyvern? 

Get out the slide rule and the correcting fluid... make sure it doesn't get washed away in the pouring rain.