Apologies for lengthy update this month:
Having failed one London council, Barnet, as chief financial officer (CFO), before being employed by Cornwall council (in their boundless wisdom), Kate Kennally somehow managed to land the top job of CEO at Cornwall council, earning a cushy £200k pa, whilst local wages were barely reaching 15k pa for most people, and then spent the last four years sealing all manner of big business deals - few of them actually benefitting local people (like sending a delegation to Cannes for the champagne and prostitute developers’ jamboree - see link bottom of article), in addition to pushing Cornwall council’s ever-growing debt rapidly towards the £2 billion-mark, just in time for interest rates to potentially push the council into bankruptcy.
Having additionally ignored the hugely difficult-to-negotiate Cornwall Local Plan (it took over 6 years to agree the 2010-30 target), and raising the 52,500 house target up to currently 70,000 and counting - we’re still 9 years away from the final year of the current plan- the number of net in-migrants to Cornwall has risen from around 5,000/year before her appointment, to 20,000 this year.
And as food bank queues grow fast, homelessness gets out of control, villages die from holiday-homitis and towns are transformed into a new urban-sprawling London commuter belt, with completely out-of-range pricing for any local worker or family, we genuinely ask ourselves if Kate Kennally and her zombie sidekicks - including the hapless or dastardly Phil Mason - actually live in the real Cornish world and if they realise that they work as “public servants” to supply services to the local community, or are they just gofors and lackeys for big business and big contracts? Because from where we’re standing, it seems Kate spends most of her time on her knees with her knickers down, accepting all manner of large offerings from the corporate building sector.
I’m sure the Falmouth, Penryn and Budock communities will be delighted to hear that yet another amenity has been taken off them - Ships and Castles swim and leisure centre - to provide more vanity projects for millionaires and their egomaniac architects, agents and lawyers to build glass and steel palaces atop Falmouth/Pendennis Point, presumably with balconies overlooking the historic Pendennis Castle.
www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/19600541.ships-castles-falmouth-closure---calls-public-pool/
More lies from councillors?
“Councillors at the time said that it was expected that the money would be repaid by GLL", shouldn't this have been a condition of the "loan"?”
Just as councillors lied over the sale of the old Richard Lander school site which they promised would never be sold for housing; oops, Taylor Wimpey must’ve known something we didn’t, or just paid the right people.
Just as they lied when they stole Truronians’ land at Tregolls Farm, that subsequently miraculously ended up as 1,000 Wain Homes.
Or the support for the desecration of the beautiful and unique environmental treasure at Tregurra valley so carpark-loving Prince Charles and Waitrose got their cake and ate it!
What about the lies at Truro City FC that meant another locally-owned people’s site was grabbed by developer Kevin Heaney and then by creditors when he went bankrupt, having got his dirty mitts on our land!
That’s just a few that we know about, but what else has OUR Cornwall council lied about, stolen, manipulated, bullied, wrongfully repossessed or concealed to undermine the very people it exists to serve?!!
One commentator noted:
“Many people welcomed the creation of Cornwall Council unitary authority hoping it would provide good governance for Cornwall and a strong voice in dealing with central government. How wrong we were.
From the very beginning it's provided nothing of the sort. We've had a costly new logo binned for being a costly new logo. We've had a Chief Executive shipped in from the other end of the country and paid more than the Prime Minister. We've had blocks of posh new offices and the sell off of perfectly adequate old Council buildings.
Power has been centralised in Truro but supposedly streamlining local democracy has only meant decision making is more remote and opaque.
The latest in the long list of abject failure is the possible closure of the few remaining Council owned leisure centres.
The District Councils were far from perfect and largely unloved but can we say housing, leisure services, bin collections, car parks and the other services the six District councils used to provide are better for being run centrally from Truro?
Cornwall Council hasn't provided strong governance nor a strong voice for Cornwall. It's been the developer's friend, the incommer's champion and a standing joke for Cornish people.”
And so, thanks to Cornwall council, our water is sewerage-strewn, our roads, and worse still, our back-lanes, are constantly full or even gridlocked (even after silly season has ended), our services have collapsed - especially social (adult) care - our council taxes and water rates are not only already some of the highest in Britain, but keep rising at the highest rates, our air is now toxic (in rural Cornwall for goodness sakes!), with a dozen towns now in AQMAs (air quality problems) and our increasing housing stock is increasingly unaffordable, despised by most and ridiculously unsustainable.
Great work, Kate Kennally!
Get the medals out and the trophy engravers ready; this woman needs some silverware to add to the gold she’s been amassing in Cornwall over the past 4 years.
And for those who don’t know the history of the Eden Project in Clay Country, here’s an interesting read:
www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/opinion/a-lesson-from-history-the-untold-eden-project-scandal
More modern cash lunacy in the Duchy:
www.cornwalllive.com/news/property/patch-land-falmouth-sale-2-5942897
The realities of tourism to Cornwall in numbers:
Some recent comments picked up on “Stop the destruction of Cornwall Now” site:
“Inflation on its way… interest rates?
Cornwall council debt???
Legacy for our kids?
When are Kennally & Mason gonna jump ship with their gilt-edged pensions and golden handshakes?!”
Re. Carbis Bay Hotel (see main photo):
“Will ALL the money spent by the Council (hours of meetings/site visits etc) be reimbursed? The tax payers money paid for Council workers time in this case should be publicised & the company should foot the bill. Why should tax payers pay for this fiasco? It should have been stopped as soon as they started, on day 1 or 2.”
“I really don’t understand why when part of the G7 was to discuss climate change, the building company saw fit to destroy the very things that are helping to sustain climate.”
“But how do they restore the criminally destroyed trees, like so many other developers around Cornwall?
Cornwall Council: a failed developer’s bitch, serving corporate masters whilst utterly failing the people it exists to serve. Thanks again Kate Kennally and Phil Mason, taking £200k pa salaries to shaft the Cornish.
“Sadly when I talk about destruction and vandalism, I don’t just mean flora, but social too. Communities have been ripped apart and the special Cornish fabric that transcended them all is nearly gone, replaced by cheaply-built yet too expensively-priced, urban-sprawling sink estates controlled by mostly foreign landlords. Supermarkets have spawned and sprawled everywhere and traditional small Cornish market towns and village communities are gone with the wind…
It might’ve happened anyway but the whole process has been facilitated by inept, greedy, ethically-challenged, ethnic-hating, corrupt, complicit and/or clumsy council officers and councillors over the past three decades.
Cornwall council is a horror show of waste, inefficiency and poor, vision less, short-term decision-making by second and third rate ego-monster officers often rejected by councils up the line…
And the current duet of Kate Kennally & Phil Mason are leading the orchestra up Mount Truro…”