Kildare councillors split from officials on allocation of funding 

KILDARE-Newbridge draft budget plan was presented to members who debated the allocation of funds to the council’s public realm maintenance section and voted to have it moved to the municipal district local area department.

Director of finance, digital services, innovation and governance Eileen O’Hanlon presented the draft budget to the members, detailing that the budget had gone up by 9% and that a huge positive can be seen in the €133,000 of local property tax retained from this last year.

She told members that there is a proposed increase in Tidy Towns and parks and playgrounds maintenance. However, this means there would be a potential reduction in road projects at €386,000, down from previous years, and in the pay parking budget, which could be an area of concern for the municipal district (MD).

The reason for the latter comes down to a new pay park tender scheduled for April 2026, as well as a review of pay parking by-laws by the end of the year.

First to speak was cllr Tracey O’Dwyer, who suggested the draft plan be amended to allocate a portion of the funds into the traffic-calming category, querying the decision to allocate a large sum of the funds to the public realm section, which is “not staffed”.

“Why put the money into something we can’t use?” asked cllr O’Dwyer, adding that the people of the MD want the “nuts and bolts” of what the council is for, such as street cleaning and the repair of potholes on roads.

Many other cllrs including, Chris Pender and Suzanne Doyle, agreed with cllr Tracey O’Dwyer point, adding that the €164,000 allocated to public realm maintenance was fruitless, when the local MD office takes care of public realm maintenance currently.

Ms O’Hanlon told members that the reason the funds were placed in public realm maintenance is due to the onboard of three new staff members in the section, who will require new equipment and vehicles to carry out works, which will amount to €70,000 for equipment alone and €94,000 in total for the new staff.

Cllr Suzanne Doyle questioned the decision to hire new staff in the public realm section, adding that it sets the council up for “inflexibility,” while the existing local area team are ‘jacks of all trades’ and already doing the jobs efficiently.

Ms O’Hanlon replied that it is “not within a councillor’s remit to administer staff”.

Cllr Suzanne Doyle reiterated that she was not suggesting managing job creation or saying where exactly the funds should go, rather she wished to guide the money into a certain stream/area, and asked if the public realm team was focused on capital projects.

Ms O’Hanlon clarified that the public realm maintenance team would mostly cover general maintenance, and would include the cleaning-up of areas such as parks and roundabouts.

It was cllr Suzanne Doyle’s opinion that currently there is “no rationale” as to why that proportion of the budget should go to public realm maintenance, and proposed moving the allocated funds to the local area section instead.

Cllr Pender, who was initially onboard with transferring the funds to the local area team, ultimately decided against voting for the transfer as he was “not comfortable” voting in favour of moving the money if it was meant for specific projects which had not been outlined.

The members took a vote on this, which saw support from several councillors and resulted in the sum of €164,000 being moved from the public realm maintenance section to the municipal district office.

A second decision was made on the day, in which the members agreed to transfer €5,000 that was allocated for Tidy Towns to Kildare Heritage Centre, an official Fáilte Ireland Tourist Office.