Leitrim is 'most dependent county' on government funding, budget meeting attendees hear

Leitrim is the county that is most dependent on government funding, it was revealed Monday's budget meeting. 

Talking about housing maintenance, Vincent Dwyer, Director of Finance in Leitrim County Council, said there was "a lot of competing demands within the budget from local roads to housing maintenance to match funding initiatives. We are the most dependent local authority, nationally, on state funding. Our commercial rates account for about 40per cent of our income and on the east coast, it would account for between 45 and 40 per cent of the income of some counties. Our capacity to move moneys around in terms of relocation is limited as funding is mostly earmarked for programmes and projects. 

Cllr Padraig Fallon had asked if there was more funding available for the council to take on more maintenance staff in the housing section. "I'm concerned about the budget for planned maintenance works in that it's only 3 per cent and I think it may need to be more."

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Cllr Paddy O'Rourke, at the same meeting, raised the issue of derelict houses in the county and talked about "disposable properties" around the county saying that "there are cottages built in the seventies and eighties that have issues with right-of-ways and now in semi-derelict state. Do we have plan to how we can utilise them?"

Mary Quinn, director of housing, said that if Cllr O'Rourke gave her a "a list of those houses, we're happy to get them looked at it. They may well be houses previously bought out by the tenants at the time and haven't passed down through the generations or put into productive use. If you give me the locations, we'll validate them against our data set. 

Regarding maintenance staff, Ms Quinn said that while more maintenance staff were not in the works this year, this didn't mean that it wasn't a possibility in the future. "It's not in this year's iteration; we are trying to tap into every possible funding source to minimise the burden on the local authority.