On Monday 9th January Saffron Walden Town Council approved the budget for the 2017 financial year in line with the 5-year financial plan adopted in January 2016.
Paul Gadd (R4U)“We will continue to work hard on the Town Council to ensure that services are maintained, assets are repaired and properly looked after, new professional working methods are adopted and the Council’s financial reserves are slowly rebuilt.”
“The most visible project is the restoration work to the Town Hall, which continues to be on time and on budget, and we are looking forward to a scaffolding-free building in the reasonably near future. We have prudently used long term borrowing to part-fund these works while interest rates are at record lows. This helps to avoid an undue financial burden unfairly falling on current taxpayers. At the same time we have made great progress in other areas. We have refurbished the interior of the Golden Acre Community Centre. We have also remedied the sports field at Catons Lane, and it now provides a much needed resource for junior teams. We have set up working groups to look at increasing the capacity of the Town Hall, to work with ECC for schemes to improve our roads and pavements and to revamp our playgrounds, and we are advancing proposals to put a proper path across the bottom of the Common and to further improve Golden Acre.”