Litton Parish Council

The following is a precis of a newsletter sent from Litton Parish Council to residents in December 2012.

As you may know there have been a number of resignations. 
Anne Evans, John Evans and myself have not resigned. We will be holding a public meeting in March to which all residents, including children and young people will be invited. We will tell you more about how we want to work and listen to your views. March seems a long way off and we would have liked to move on with this agenda a lot more quickly. Firstly, this is a new way of working for the council and our information is not currently in a form which can be presented easily for discussion. Secondly, preparing this information will take some time and as the clerk to the council, Naomi McFadyen, has resigned we will have to recruit temporary help.
In the meantime business will continue as normal and I would draw your attention to the following:
Extraordinary council meetings will be held in December and early February. Information about these will soon be on parish council notice boards.
There are four vacancies on the parish council and these need to be filled. We will publish arrangements for filling the vacancies also on the notice boards. 
Sadly over the last few months there have been disagreements between councillors about the way the council is run and about the role of councillors. The focus has been, mainly, on two problematic areas.
The three remaining councillors asked for more information about the budget. Also we were concerned about the way some decisions had been taken and asked to see the documents which set out how decisions had been made. The other councillors would not support our requests and so the information was not forthcoming.
The other issue arose when we challenged the prevailing view among councillors that individual councillors could not talk to residents about council business and could not hold meetings with each other without the clerk being present. We could not accept this as right or reasonable. Our view that councillors can do these things with certain caveats has been confirmed by the Derbyshire Association of Local Councils.
It has been a difficult and distressing time but we are not ‘in crisis’ as the article in the December edition of the Village Voice suggests. We know where we are going, although we might not get everything right over the next few months and we apologise for this in advance.
We will advertise the March public meeting through our next newsletter and on notice boards. In the meantime if you have any ideas about how we might help you then email me on gsrooke@btinternet.com.