Local Authority Chat Room

@ShaneP wrote:

Fantastic – just read the thread about homophobic bouncers in Naas, not to mention the directions someone else was kind enough to give to their house, must pay them a visit to see their reaction. The future of Kildare planning is in safe hands, – must get back there now to see if anyone in Monasterevin has any thoughts on the economic situation in Uzbekistan.

Hmmmm,

if they spent more time watching bent planners and keeping http://webiplan.kildarecoco.ie/ up than discussing homophobic bouncers and Uzbeki economics the county planning system might not be such a mess.

It is still down

Still down

Still down 6th day and counting any news on the status of that planner?

11/08/2005 13:20:04

Subject: Re: Online Planning

Message:

Apologies to all who’ve had problems getting into the planning system.

We know that there have been problems, but it would appear that this may have to do with factors outside our control. We are working with Eircom to find a solution.

Some of the things being said are on the wild side. There’s no foundation for an allegation that something dodgy is being concealed. We are not hiding anything to do with planning applications: if we wanted to be like that we would never have gone on line in the first instance! Our on-line service was introduced at our initiative, long before the Minister made his recent announcement. In fact the service has been up and running since 2001 with very little off time up to now.

The other stuff criticising staff -making out that we’re idling is just nonsense. Our staff are just as good as anybody else’s staff, and in some cases a lot better. This kind of groundless griping is just that. Fair play is good sport: any chance we can have some?

By the way, reference was made to minutes of meetings not being available on the net until a few months after the particular meeting. That’s true and we do it that way for a reason. Before publication, we send minutes back for confirmation to the committee or council as the case may be, and in some cases that involves a two-tier process which can spread over a two month period. (The normal inter-meeting period is one month). In the meantime the business of our meetings is covered in considerable detail on radio and in the newspapers within a few days.

So the information is out there. The official record is also made available: its just doesn’t happen immediately, that’s all.

County council meetings, and quite a number of committee meetings are open to the public, and that’s another way you can get information about what happens at them. How many businesses and or companies make their board meetings open to the public?

Charlie Talbot
Kildare County Council

You are not a business you are a department of Local Government and as such have very onerous responsibility under both the Freedom of Information Act and Arhus Convention.

It has been down for at least 6 days Stephen and differing and conflicting excuses have been given for this, there is a right for the public to have information relating to the planning process Minister Roche has decreed this as government policy as of the 26th of October last. No other Local Authority I have visited has had an outage time of six days or anything more than a couple of hours on their online planning system in my experience.

The above response basically blames eircom for the entire situation which may be the case but if it is the case what have Kildare County Council done to rectify the situation on the public’s behalf? Presumably there is a contract in force that can be enforced and if there is no contract surely a new ISP can be engaged. They have sat back and done very little if results are the standard to be measured.

The net result of this is that the workload of planning staff will be increased further as many queries that are currently dealt with online will now have to be dealt with in real time, further exacerbating their already over-worked time. This is an IT problem that has not been adequately addressed by either the IT department or the Senior Management above them.