Gollum, it helps to have two things:-<br><br>1. An understanding of how council funding works AND is interpreted.<br>2. A cynical view.<br><br>There is an aspect of council funding that is use it or lose it. I don't know that this is enshrined in the statutes or whatever but I have been told it exists in reality by several councillors and local politicians. Effectively the councils have a budget for each particular aspect of their working remit. If the budget does not get used it is not automatically rolled over to the next year but is actually often used as an excuse to cut the budget for the following year instead. Apparently this quite often results in almost the exact thing you described.<br><br>Locally to me, we see so many complete and utter white elephants such as bike lanes that are less than 300m long, starting from nowhere and going nowhere, electrically displaying road signs that do nothing but spout utter tosh such as "consider car sharing", "start your journey in plenty of time" and these signs are often not even put in a potentially useful place such as a main arterial route which could then be used for useful traffic information. Unsurprisingly (unsurprising that is if you have point 2 above), many of these initiatives are set up towards the end of the council's accounting year.<br><br>So yes it is quite possible that there is a significant amount of utilisation of funds for one thing that then get used for something totally different and substantially less important. The one I mentioned earlier about using the CCTV to catch someone putting their bins out on the wrong day - they had to train a CCTV camera exclusively on this person's home for several weeks to garner sufficient evidence of his crime, thereby using a supposed terrorist/crime resource away from doing its supposed proper duty.<br><br>A complete mis-use of power IMO - and they're doing it on my bloody money too.
