Happy
New Year to all my constituents and readers of this blog, wherever in the world
you might be reading it from.
Speaking
clock
I
thought I would start 2014 with a couple of updates. An earlier post reported that public bodies
had spent more than £14,000 of taxpayers’ money phoning the speaking clock over
the past five years. Dundee City Council accounted for a small part of that
total and I raised the matter with the council’s chief executive. In response the
head of information technology has confirmed that the speaking clock telephone
number is blocked on mobile phones and all landlines.
Apparently
it has always been blocked on mobile phones. It should have been blocked across
all landlines in the council but due to a technical failure, which has since
been resolved; it wasn’t blocked for a period of time on some of them.
Slipway
Beach Crescent
I was pleased to see the bollards installed at the old slipway in Beach Crescent.
Towards the end of 2012 I was contacted by a constituent who told me that she
had been standing at the railings at the bottom of the slipway watching the swans with her young
grandchild, when one of the cars parked at the top of the
slipway rolled down, without any occupants, and banged into the railings. It just
missed her but it gave her a huge shock. Speaking later to one of the
shopkeepers she was told the same thing happened a couple of weeks before. I
asked the council’s head of transportation if he could arrange for his traffic engineers
to check the safety of the location and he agreed that a bollard type system
would prevent similar occurrences. Unfortunately due to other priorities it has
taken until the latter part of this financial year for the scheme to be implemented.
The
council confirmed that it is not a functioning slipway but the bollards are
able to be removed just in case it needs to be used in the future.
