Monthly Archives: January 2023

FOUR JOBS TAKES THE FIFTH

Gissa job

Great news just in. Our four-jobs mayor, the Reverend Rees, has now declared his fifth job!

He’s now picking up an honorarium from 17 Rooms, part of Centre for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC and the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. An honorarium is payment for services rendered and Rees has registered it as a pecuniary interest under ’employment’ .

This latest little income uplift fits alongside being chair of the Local Government Association’s (LGA) City Regions Board (1.5 to 2 days a week), chair of Core Cities and a non-executive director at TV company Plimsoll Productions.

We know he gets £83k as mayor (plus a councillor allowance of £14k) and that his LGA allowance is £17.5k. However, the rest of his pay is undisclosed.

This new Brookings Institute/Rockefeller gig seems to involve the Reverend pursuing his Atlanticist interests and promoting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. A self-interested US-led global free market template for the ‘free world’. A long way from Bristol.

You have to wonder when the Reverend finds any time to be the executive mayor of Bristol?

WEXCIT 2: THE HORROR CONTINUES

dan-norris signing off
Will anyone sign up to work with the WECA Man?

The revolving door at WECA, our regional government basketcase, must be about to come off its hinges.

Head of Infrastructure, David Carter; Section 151 Officer Malcolm Coe; dodgy Monitoring Officer Shahzia “Dim” Daya; Head of Transport Jason Humm and Democratic Services boss, Ian Hird all cleared off over last autumn and winter.

Since then another whole new bunch have headed for the door.

Among them are Mina Davies, Head of Comms; Katherine Vowles who was brought in as an interim Head of Infrastructure; Jack Catkoviv: he scarpered before the end of his probation period as the new Head of Democratic Services; Laura Ambler Head of Planning and Housing and, now, new Interim Comms boss Ruth Wilmshurst has decided WECA ain’t really for her.

This news arrives as WECA’s auditors slam the management and governance of the authority after an investigation that found five “significant weaknesses” at the authority.  They were especially displeased that the Head of Infrastructure, David Carter’s £59k handout for quitting had put the organisation “at the potential risk of committing to an unlawful payment”.

Auditors say the person responsible for the generous gift, notorious Chief Exec Patricia Greer “was acting in good faith” while potentially breaking the law.

Good faith lawbreaking? That’s some USP.

KLU KLUX KLANGER

Adkins
White supremacist

The council’s new racist Kulture Kommandant Genevieve “Klu Klux” Adkins has wasted no time foisting her white supremacist vision on the city.

You may recall our fragrant new council Head of Culture and Creative Industries told bemused staff back in August, “Black people don’t make or spend money. Why don’t you programme things for white people?”

So no surprises at the recent announcement that the Georgian House Museum on Great George Street is to close until next April. Many doubt, given the scale of cuts Adkins wants to make, that the museum will ever open again. A significant blow to the city.

The Georgian House, a reproduction of sugar plantation and slave owner’s home from around 1790, is the nearest thing we currently have in Bristol to a museum marking the city’s role in the slave trade.

What next from Adkins? Hopefully not much as she has been on leave for “personal reasons” since the Bristolian publicised her public racist outbursts.

MYRA WALKS!

Saskia
“Ground control to Major Tom. I’ve fucked it all right up”

We learn that the appalling Saskia “Hindley” Koynenburg, Bristol City Council’s Head of External Comms and one of the Reverend’s main council flunkeys has quit the council. Her last day was September 30. Was that a small cheer we heard from her long-suffering staff as she left the building?

Hindley’s days always seem numbered at the council after she shot to national notoriety on Youtube this summer for trying to stop the Nazi Post’s LDR journalist, Alex Seabrook, asking the Reverend a question at a press conference because that “wasn’t part of his job description” or some such nonsense.

Matters then got worse for the embittered failed journalist when she was discovered at the centre of the SEND spy scandal. It was Hindley’s sicko team trawling parents’ social media accounts and supplying juicy nuggets of personal information and photos of parents of vulnerable children to Bristol’s SEND managers.

It rather looks like Hindley is fleeing the scene of a crime doesn’t it?

HIPSTER NEWS

Bris Rail Line
The old North Somerset Railway Line

Plans to turn the ‘tramway’ – a section of the old North Somerset Railway Line in Brislington – into a PR-friendly hipster heaven Greenway for cyclists and snooty businesses running out of shipping containers have gone off the, er, rails.

 Trendy property-less firm, Meanwhile Creative, got planning permission back in March from the council for the temporary greenway on land long earmarked for the Callington Link, on the route of the proposed A4 Bath Road relief road, by promising their greenway was “ready-to-go”.

Or perhaps not. Over six months down the line and Meanwhile Creative are now wheeling out that all-purpose excuse “the cost of living crisis” and claiming it’s unlikely to go ahead. Informed opinion, however, says this is because neither the applicants nor the council owned the land and the people who did wanted £250k for it.

None of this is surprising to some Brislington locals who have dubbed the efforts of Lib Dem Councillors Andrew “Reg” Varney and Jos “Peculiar” Clarke and Labour councillor Tim “The Ripper” Rippington along with Bike Bristol and the Meanwhiles as “an embarrassing failure”.

 Lookout for that lovely link road coming to quiet green space in Brislington soon!

COMPANY NEWS

City Leap  BE

More bad news for the council’s City Leap energy project. Accounts lodged at Companies House for 2021-22 show that Bristol Heat Networks Ltd registered a loss of £937,471. A loss that will have to be paid by council tax payers.

The council wanted to sell the business to Swedish state energy company, Vattenfall, by December 2022 as part of City Leap. A deadline that’s been missed. So who pays the losses since March? Will the sale price even cover these losses?

Meanwhile, Goram Homes,the council’s housebuilding firm reported a loss of £850,730. Creating aloss of £2.4m since the council started the company

Crisis-hit BristolWaste are yet to file accounts.

More up-to-date City Leap news coming soon!