A nice little corporate earner: the bridge to nowhere at Arena Island
Plans by Bristol City Council, cloaked in secrecy, to hand over the prime Arena Island site to pension fund L&G for free without an open market sale or procurement process continue.
The deal, cooked up by the council’s former £260k a year interim regeneration boss Colin “Headboy” Molton, who was officially characterised by the council’s own legal team last year as “incompetent”, finds the council guaranteeing rents for 40 years on a speculative office slab L&G intend to build on the site.
And there’s lots more public money to go around for privileged corporate sector players in on this public money giveaway. For instance, new council regeneration boss Stephen “Preening” Peacock has just signed off £420k to a corporate ‘strategic partner’ (Arcadis working with Arup and Mott MacDonald) “to provide project management, cost management and design services to maintain progress”.
Progress on what? Er, a further £32 million worth of “enabling works” on the site that the public are paying for before handing the site over to L&G.free of charge.
How many HR managers does it take to create a shortlist for a Director of Homes and Landlord Services at coolly efficient and agile Bristol City Council? Er, four!
The selection meeting notice for the post sent to councillors listed four HR bosses as attending, including the ridiculously thick and useless HR director duo of John ‘Bedwetter’ Walsh and Mark “Bashar” Williams. They’re accompanied by their underlings Celia “Hopefully not a Relation?” Williams and James “Betty” Brereton, presumably in case any reading of long words or adding up is required from an HR director?
Also at the meeting are no less than two council lawyers, the Head of Democratic Engagement and regeneration bald eagle Stephen “Preening” Peacock. All these staff to advise a small committee of five councillors?
When the council is looking to make £20m of cuts later this year, perhaps they should start by cutting the three extra HR bosses and the spare lawyer sat about at meetings before they start further wrecking our frontline services?
Why were an unholy alliance of council bosses so keen to prevent a meeting of councillors scrutinising the fatcats’ confusing and secretive “Billion Pound” City Leap plan last week? Who do these clowns really work for?
City Leap is the latest senior officer brainchild to emerge out of Bristol City Council and they’re spending £10m of our money on it. The money’s being spent on procuring a multinational corporation as a ‘joint venture partner’ in, er, wait for it … An energy business!
This time the business is aimed at cashing in on ‘net zero’ by, among other things, building and running unregulated neighbourhood heat networks across the city to “‘up the pace’ in reaching carbon neutrality targets”,
Chief Exec Mike “Billie Jean” Jackson; Exec Director for Growth and Regeneration, Stephen “Preening” Peacock and Energy Services boss David “Payday” White all told councillors at a scrutiny meeting last week that there was absolutely no role for them in City Leap until their secretive high stakes procurement process was finished in February.
The officers explained they would then generously allow councillors a couple of hours to rubberstamp their extraordinarily expensive done deal a few days before it goes to cabinet to get signed off by the Reverend, a Yale-trained corporate puppet.
The unscrupulous threesome explained that any attempt now at democratic scrutiny of this latest council energy scheme would have a ‘material impact on the procurement’.
Bizarre reasoning asserting that the council’s constitution and the right of councillors to scrutinise the executive like any normal functioning democracy should be suspended. On the basis that it might upset any multinational corporation lining up at the trough these officers are generously setting up for them.
All highly irregular. Surely any multinational that wants to work with Bristol City council needs to understand from the get-go that they’re working in a democratic environment where public scrutiny of their work is likely to be regular and detailed? And if they don’t like our democracy in Bristol? Well, they can fuck off to any of the many dictatorships around the world with their money can’t they?
Why are Bristol City Council bosses, whose jobs should directly involve upholding the constitution of Bristol City Council to the letter, creating an environment where the city’s democratic norms need to be ignored because corporate interests are waving some money around? Isn’t this exactly the time democratic scrutiny is needed?
A similar fiasco unfolded with Bristol Energy. Scrutiny and opposition councillors were persistently refused access to vital company information by officers. Councillors were unable to scrutinise what was going on at the company and the result was an estimated £50m loss to council taxpayers.
Is it acceptable for officers to set up yet another energy business shrouded in secrecy that can repeat exactly the same mistakes all over again?
It’s quite the bromance isn’t it? Will
the lovestruck Reverend Rees ever let his wannabe property speculator FRIEND
WITH BENEFITS, city council Executive Director of Growth and Regeneration,
Colin “Head Boy” Molton, go?
Stephen “Preening” Peacock,
the replacement for the Reverend’s dubiously appointed CONSTITUTIONAL WRECK
of a £1,500 a day council exec with a taste for £200 taxi trips on us, finally
arrived at the Counts Louse on the 26 September. However, we were soon informed
that Head (Lover) Boy would NOT BE WALKING OUT on the Reverend just yet
and that the starry-eyed lovers could carry on sharing their public land
giveaway fetish, romantic Cote D’Azure mini breaks and secret trysts on the
third floor of the Council House for a while yet.
The latest excuse provided by a council
PR for the NON-EXIT of Lover Boy and his ample wage demands is that
“There will be a sensible period of handover between Colin and Stephen to
ensure a smooth transition and to maintain momentum with major projects”.
Although, the poorly briefed PR was UNABLE TO SAY when this bizarre ménage
a trois might end. How much longer will we have to pay Lover Boy £1,500 a
day for services rendered to the mayor? Days? Weeks? Months?
Rees’s new love interest, Peacock, will
have to struggle along on a wage of just £165k a year and the GOOD NEWS
is that he will also be subject to PAYE like his employees. The BAD NEWS
is that Peacock’s another South West Regional Development Agency reject with a
“huge amount of experience of economic development, major regeneration
projects, technology and the energy sector”.
Doesn’t this sound dangerously similar
to Lover Boy? Has the Reverend fallen head over heels for yet another naive
career bureaucrat with a high opinion of himself who’ll get SHAGGED
ABSOLUTELY SENSELESS when he falls prey to CORPORATE PROPERTY PIMPS
with an eye for his assets?
