With one thing and another there’s an awful lot going on at the moment.
Old Grumpy notices that Carmarthenshire County Council seems to have thrown in the towel over the unorthodox senior officers’ pension arrangements.
Last week a secret meeting of the council’s bigwigs resolved that: “Without conceding that it is intrinsically unlawful, that the pay supplement policy be withdrawn on procedural grounds.”
For the uninitiated, “Pay supplement policy” is a euphemism for allowing senior officers to have their employer’s pension contributions in their pay packet rather than being paid into the pension fund.
Roughly translated the resolution means: We’ve done nothing wrong, but we’re going to stop doing it anyway.
Where Carmarthen leads, can Pembrokeshire be far behind?
Not surprisingly, Leader Cllr Jamie Adams is keeping his head down.
I have decided to take a break from the grants’ business in Pembroke Dock to make a brief visit to the subject of the unlawful use of county council computers by senior members of the IPG (as it then was) for party political purposes.
Readers will recall that, a couple of weeks ago, I related that ex-Cllr David Wildman had admitted to the Ombudsman that he had been involved in this clandestine activity.
He could hardly do otherwise because clicking on the properties of these documents revealed that his name appeared as the creator of 23 of them.
But he was a mere dabbler compared to the IPG’s “election coordinator” Cllr Rob Lewis whose electronic fingerprints are to be found on more than 90 occasions.
And what’s more, while Cllr Lewis was busy subverting the democratic process, he was also, supposedly, doing the full time job of cabinet member for highways and transportation (SRA £15,000 p.a.).
Running the IPG’s election campaign must have required a good deal of “face time” with the cabinet room computers, especially as careful study reveals that some of this election material went through multiple revisions.
For instance the document “candidates’ sheet” underwent no fewer than 42 revisions all of which must have taken up valuable time that might have been better spent attending to the potholes in the county’s roads.
But the one that caught my eye was the election address of Jim Codd which Cllr Lewis appears to have edited 16 times.
Now, I must declare an interest in all this because, had ex-Cllr Codd held on to his seat, I might have been spared the constant stream of ageist jokes involving dodos, dinosaurs and fossils that litter the website of the young whippersnapper who knocked Jim off his perch.
And Rob Lewis must take a large measure of blame because, despite the 16 revisions, Jim Codd’s election address went through the doors in his ward with the ‘t’ missing from East Williamston in three different places.
It hardly needs me to point out that the inability to correctly spell the name of the ward is liable to make a negative impression on the electorate.
So while Jacob might like to think that his youthful charm, intelligence and charisma carried the day, we now know that it was Rob Lewis’s poor spelling wot dun it.
I’ve put down a question for the Leader at Thursday’s meeting of council asking if he was aware of this industrial-scale electioneering being carried out in the Cabinet room.
What’s the betting that he didn’t?
