What a dog-bin ding dong at town council

Mayor Tom Kirton wisely told Monmouth town council recently: “When you look after a place other people tend to look after a place and even those that don’t care tend to not touch it”.

It’s the old broken-window truism: leave a window broken and you’ll get another, ignore graffiti and soon there’ll be a wall of it; etc.

Perhaps if the council’s clerk’s office (CO) had been listening to the mayor they might not have told me so complacently they saw no problem, when I reported that one of the council’s dog-waste bins on the lane to Vauxhall Fields had been damaged.

Surely no one with any pride in place would put up at home with anything so skew-whiff and scruffy as this damaged bin, so why does the CO think that it is just fine for the public space?

The town council is setting a low standard for everyone to follow.

To explain, this metal bin has had such a bash it now sticks out into the little lane, and at its narrowest point, too. At the back of the bin, where it is attached to a pole, the metal is jagged and torn; the lid no longer fits properly and you can’t open it completely because it rides up against the fencing rail above it.

After saying they could not see the “health and safety issues” I had raised (unsurprisingly, since I had raised none: I had simply sent them photos of the damage and asked for the bin to be repaired or replaced), the CO told me: “If the bin becomes further damaged or does not function as intended then we will put this to council for further consideration.”

In other words, they hadn’t even mentioned to councillors what’s being done (or, in this case, not done) in their name.

As it was obvious that only an encounter with a tyre of one of the gigantic trucks on manoeuvres at the army camp at the time could have done the damage I suggested to the CO they talked to the Army to see if their insurance might cover it.

They replied: “Without evidence that the bin was damaged by an army vehicle it is not possible for us to address this with them”. Not even a friendly chat, then. A china dog could do better.

Charles Boase

Monmouth