QUESTIONS have been asked around the blocks in place preventing Mayor John Moran from spending his annual discretionary fund.
Councillors were informed at the recent full meeting of Limerick Council that €1.1million from the mayoral fund last year was unspent and will now be handed back to central government.
Fine Gael councillor John Sheahan deemed this a “sizeable amount of money”. He said he was grateful to see it coming to Limerick but took the view that there needs to be a barometer of additionality to see what this seed money might develop into over a period of time.
Cllr Sheahan then asked the directly-elected Mayor what he believed the three main blocks were in preventing him from spending his mayoral fund.
Mayor Moran started by saying that he hoped the answer for this year would be different to last year. Essentially, he told Cllr Sheahan, that the ability of the Council to build in the delivery of the additional items was proving a challenge.
“We had the team in from Grant Thornton at the end of the year and they made recommendations to how we can actually do better this year and those recommendations are underway,” he explained.
The bottom line, Mayor Moran claimed, is that it’s difficult for the organisation to do what he thinks it needs to do. This, he opined, is to identify, on a monthly or quarterly basis, the items being delivered across the Council to see if there is HR capacity to deliver a particular project.
According to Limerick’s first citizen, a robust programme management system within the Council is needed, which he says is not yet in place and is causing a struggle to map all the objectives of the mayoral programme into deliverables over the rest of his term.
Cllr John Sheahan is was not impressed.
“Basically, what you are saying is, you believe the capacity isn’t in the organisation to do it, and yet we can manage as an organisation to put €200-odd-million through the books here and get it spent every year. I’m not fully convinced on that,” he told the Mayor.
Cllr Sheahan said he believed the capacity is there within the Council, it’s just not operating the way it should be.
“We can’t have that situation going on, and I don’t think Dublin would allow that situation to rollover.”
Mayor Moran agreed that there’s no way they would be able to negotiate a rollover next year, but took the view that councillors needed to understand the limitations on the mayoral role in how it is set up.
“It is a tension that exists in an organisation when you have two sets of priorities and only one person allocating the resources to how they work,” he said.
Cllr Sheahan had a suggestion for the Mayor.
“There’s a piece that’s not written down in the legislation or anywhere, it’s a thing called delegation and trust. We have to trust each other in this organisation. If we don’t trust each other, we’ll go nowhere. No one person can deliver the whole show,” he suggested.
Council Director General Dr Pat Daly welcomed the opportunity for a behind-closed-doors session to work out the difficulties currently at play within the organisation.
“It’s not like the DG is Caesar. The DG is not Caesar. You can’t run an organisation like this without having some flexibilities and we’re trying to bring all the systems together,” he said.
– Local Democracy Reporting Scheme