Councillor says dirty signs and street furniture “doesn’t give a good impression of this place”
Ards and North Down Borough Council is to look at “basic maintenance” and cleaning of public infrastructure, following a viral social media video showing a local cleaning firm cleaning signage around Bangor for free.
Elected representatives have unanimously agreed to a DUP motion calling for a review of the maintenance of council property and the public realm. The motion passed at committee level and will go to the council’s full council at the the end of the month for ratification, where it is expected to pass.
Councillors are reacting to high profile media reports at the start of the year focusing on individuals from a private cleaning firm who spent the holiday period voluntarily cleaning public signage around Bangor for free after describing the situation as “shameful.”
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The man who conceived the motion, DUP Councillor Alistair Cathcart, said at the February meeting of the council’s Environment committee: “We are calling our council to get back to basics and ensure our towns, cities and villages are looking their best. A dirty footpath, flowerbeds being unkept, street furniture being damaged and not maintained – it doesn’t give a good impression of this place.
“The council is making fantastic progress on the bigger stuff, the regeneration scheme for Bangor and elsewhere are really terrific, but I don’t think there has been enough focus on getting the basics right.”
He said: “The dirty street signs may not sound that important in the grand scheme of things, but they are really noticeable, they irritate people, and give the impression that we just don’t care. That is not the impression I want to give of Bangor, or this borough. But I am spending a lot of time reporting these basic maintenance issues.
“The council are very good in their responses to that, and I am grateful for the hard work they do, but it shouldn’t be dealt with in a reactive manner. There should be policies in place to ensure the basic maintenance of our urban centres is being done.”
He said the matter came to a head for him around Christmas with the “dirty” City Hall sign at Bangor, which went viral on social media.
He said: “It became a symbol of the council not caring, and frankly being so useless that they couldn’t even clean their own sign on their own building. It has been embarrassing for the council. We have a sign policy in place but it clearly wasn’t followed.
“We agreed a proactive maintenance strategy 10 years ago when this council was formed. It is clear this needs to be reviewed, because it is not working as well as it should.
“There are elements that work well, the maintenance strategy for our buildings works quite well, but it is around those things I have mentioned, the signs, the furniture and other public realm is really the concern.”
The council motion states it will commit to a review of its current proactive maintenance and cleansing regimes, “highlighting options and opportunities for improvement and associated budgetary requirements, so as to allow members to consider potential improvements in outcomes.”
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