Team to tackle highway and green space issues
A NEW combined council team is streamlining the process of dealing with issues arising from the area’s highways and green spaces, councillors heard.
Head of Neighbourhoods, Andrew Pitts, said Calderdale Council’s green spaces and street scene team was often taking a new approach to tasks following amalgamation.
Duties the new team deals with takes in keeping neighbourhoods and town centres clean, maintaining parks and open spaces, looking after play areas, allotments, and sports pitches, repairing potholes, pavements, walls and drainage, protecting and and enhance the countryside, keeping the highway network open in bad weather and dealing with a range of highway-related emergencies round the clock.
From sweeping streets via collecting litter to fixing potholes, issues relating to these probably populated members’ email inboxes more than any other issue except waste management, he said.
“My overall summary would be that the service has made
a positive start, but it is very much work in progress,” said Mr Pitts.
The service needed to use technology more, it needed to get a grip on fly-tipping, not just on enforcement but also clearing it up, and engage more with local communities and getting local people involved, he told
the council’s Place Scrutiny Board.
An opportunity had also been given to the council to change the way it looked at maintenance programmes – at what is needed rather than what was historically done, said Mr Pitts.
Coun Regan Dickenson (Con, Rastrick) said when the teams
were merged there was talk about synergies producing savings and asked if there had been any?
Mr Pitts said a £50,000 saving had been made by the act of merging the two teams, money was being saved in procurement and it was no longer the case, for example, that two different teams would be involved in a council road repair, jobs which needed doing were now done at once, reducing disruption. The board were told machinery had been adapted to do different jobs.