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A case of too many managers?
WHEN we talk of council costs, we tend to think of teachers, bin men and the price of fixing the potholes in our roads.
What we might not bank on is the sheer cost of supporting some of the authority's departments and the hefty pay packets of those who fill them.
In the case of Leeds City Council's regeneration department, for instance, around one in four members of staff is a manager, resulting in an annual bill of nearly 1.7m.
There aren't many large private companies that employ a manager for every four workers. Probably because if they did it's unlikely they would stay in business for very long.
Council bosses defend the arrangement by insisting the department delivers good value for money by delivering schemes worth more than 500m and that the number of managers is being scaled down.
Still, it does seem that a lot of our money is being spent on men and women with salaries most of us can only dream of.
Arena cover-up
THE Freedom of Information Act is meant to do just that; to make freely available information that might otherwise not see the light of day.
Yet in the case of the account of the Leeds Arena funding saga obtained by the Yorkshire Evening Post it's more a case of Freedom of the Black Pen.
It's everywhere on the report, blanking out anything that might shed light on the machinations that led to Yorkshire Forward funding for the arena project being halved.
Ludicrously, the only details that have escaped unscathed revolve around the private habits of the mostly unnamed people involved, revealing in one instance that the sender of an email was off to play snooker.
When it came into force five years ago the Act was hailed as legislation that would help the move toward more open government.
Now it has morphed into an opportunity for the censor to wield the black pen with impunity, removing any crumb of detail that is classed by a faceless Whitehall operative as being 'sensitive'.
It begs the question, just what have they got to hide?
Welcome gnome
MORE than a decade ago Britain was in the grip of a crime spree that saw decorative gnomes snatched from gardens.
This gnome-napping craze, usually followed by a postcard sent from some far-flung destination, seemed rather funny at the time.
But as the years pass we all tend to grow up a bit, and that's clearly what's happened to the culprit who swiped one of the ornaments from Denis and Doris Heard's garden back in 1996.
Now they've gone a long way to redeeming themselves by penning an anonymous letter of apology and supplying a replacement.
It's taken 13 years but at least now there's a happy ending to this story.
A case, you might say, of 'home, sweet gnome'.
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Weather for Leeds
Wednesday 23 May 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 11 C to 24 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
