All shall have prizes

Morley Town Council have decided that past Town Mayors should be given a commemorative badge to reward their contribution (in addition to their name on the past Mayors board and their photograph in the Council Chamber).

£1,000 has been allocated from the 2010 budget for this honour. Needless to say, some electors think this is a bad idea and feelings were high at the Town Meeting last night.

Michael Gomersal writes on Facebook:

I wrote a letter to the Observer last week and included copies of minutes which made reference to the past mayor's badges. They didn't print it so i'll post it here so all is not lost.

"Could a member of the Morley Borough Independent's Party please explain why, during such difficult economic times it is necessary to spend £1000 of tax payer's money on "Past Mayor's Badges".

The funding of Ten "Past Mayor's Badges" at £100 each was finally approved by the Finance and General Purposes Committee in November 2009 following over a year of discussions of which Cllr. Derek Bradley was a driving force.

As a resident of Morley I feel the money we pay to Morley Town Council could be much better spent on things such as school projects or help for the elderly instead of ten "Past Mayor's Badges" which will be of no benefit to the community at all.

I have always being a supporter of the Morley Borough Independent's but such spending at a time when many families are experiencing great hardship as forced me to re-consider my position at the forth coming elections."

I'm going to tweak it a little and send it to the YEP. Maybe I will have more luck there.

The reaction by the Councillors to being challenged was defensive and hostile:- they regarded it as worthy because the Town Mayors work so hard. Borough Mayors pre-1974 used to get one and it wasn't a large sum of money in the scheme of things. One Councillor told the person who raised the issue that he should be ashamed. Another one told me afterwards that if I didn't like paying the Precept that I should move somewhere else.

Morley Town Council is stuck in a bubble of make-believe pomp and circumstance that makes do-gooders & busybodies feel important about themselves whilst most Morleians are somewhat indifferent to it, especially as the £175,000 running costs are tucked away in the domestic rates bill.