Room for improvement for council in national table

WEXFORD COUNTY COUNCIL achieved mixed results in a comparison report of local authorities nationally, the monthly county council meeting heard.

Wexford had the third highest level of collection of housing loans nationally and the tenth highest number of library visits per head of population. Also Wexford increased the percentage of roads given a permanent surface condition index rating in all categories in 2016, with the largest increase being with regard to regional roads, where 90 per cent of roads in that category were surveyed in 2016, compared to 48 per cent in 2015.

County Secretary Pat Collins said: ‘ There were also areas where Wexford performed poorly by comparison. Over the course of the next year my office will work with the sections dealing with those areas to identify reasons and possible solutions to try to gain improvements in performance.’

He said in 2017 five performance indicators were selected for targeted action in order to achieve improvements, including: increased use of online motor tax system, improved mobilisation times for first attendance at fire and non fire scenes, an increase in the number of organisations on the public participation network, the provision of social housing and the number of household availing of a three bin service. ‘Improvements were made in all five areas in 2017 and I believe further improvements can be achieved.’

Mr Collins said the council will be focussing on major revenue collections, an increase in the number of schools participating CEO Tom Enright said: ‘We are reasonable satisfied with our performance. On housing we have been using turnkey options which are very cost effective. They allow for everything to get going.’

Mr Enright said Wexford was the first local authority nationally to advertise for builders to build houses.

‘What is taking time is to get our capacity up to construct our own houses. We lost a lot of our staff,’ he said.