By Cllr Brid Smith, People Before Profit Alliance. Labour and Fine Gael claim to be in opposition to the Government. Yet even though they have a majority on Dublin City Council, they had no problem passing on cuts in this year’s budget. The government has cut funding to the City Council this year by 6.3%. This amounts to a 20% cut in funding to the biggest council in the country since 2008.
This gives elected councillors a choice – to cut funding to housing, local amenities and services, to increase bin charges, rents and others OR to stand up to the Government.
No prizes for guessing which choice was made.
This budget abolished the waiver for bin collection for everybody on social welfare. It increased bin charges for the rest by 5%. In July the Council will impose VAT on all charges including bins by either 13.5% or 21%.
On top of this the budget for the fire service was cut. Funding to the BASE youth project in Ballyfermot was cut. And council rents for subsidiary earners was increased.
The same budget cut the rates for businesses by 2.4% and gave a further hand out to developers by cutting capital spending on social housing and giving extra to the council to lease property from developers. And all council workers have had their pay cut by over 17% in the last year.
Councillors could have voted against this budget. And yes we could have been abolished and the manager could have implemented the same budget. So we would not get our wages or our expenses but we would have shown the government we had the bottle to stand up to them and to organise in our communities against their agenda of attacking the poor to bail out the rich.
This was the most controversial issue in the council budget. Disgracefully the waiver on bin lifts for 40,000 lowest income households in the city was removed. The waiver on the standing charge of €95 was left in place for this year. Families and pensioners whose income is so low that they pay no income tax, will now have to pay €6 for each bin lift and this comes on top of cuts to social welfare for the young, the disabled and carers.
The anti bin tax campaign has always argued that the waiver scheme was a temporary measure and would be used to undermine resistance to bin taxes. Unfortunately we have been proven correct.
The Anti Bin Tax Campaign is waiting on a decision on the Supreme Court case fairly soon. The hearing finished early January. Whatever the outcome is we will be organising local meetings in response. Water tax is just around the corner with metres to be installed in all homes by end of 2010.
People Before Profit councillors will be arguing for a re-launch of a mass campaign against all of these stealth taxes.