Liberal Democrats at North Yorkshire County Council claim that their worst fears about the Tory County Council’s highway depot rationalisation programme are now being realised.

In November last year it was revealed that the project, originally estimated at £10.5 million had risen to £16M, an increase of more than 50%. This prompted County Cllr Bill Hoult, Leader of the Lib Dems at County Hall, to allege that the estimates must have been prepared on “the back of a fag packet”.

The Liberal Democrats “called in” the decision to look again at the finances, what went wrong and how confident the Council was that costs could be contained. However, the Executive of the Council dismissed concerns and agreed to bale out the scheme by borrowing £3.8m and gambled on increasing land values of the depots to be sold providing the rest.

The current credit crunch has scuppered that confident expectation and revised estimates of land values reveal a drop rather than an increase in land values from £12.4M to £10.4M with a “health warning” that the volatility of current market conditions may make things worse. Even though some savings have been made on the Richmond depot by leasing and refurbishment rather than buying a new site with new building, the financial shortfall has deepened.

A report was presented to the Tory County Council Executive on the 19 August 2008 recommending that further sales of Depots be put on hold in the hope that land values improve. To bridge the funding gap progress on the depot rationalisation will be underwritten from Council finances.

“This is a result of the lack of effective and robust project management rather than the present management of projects which seems to stumble from crisis to crisis, a process that can get by in a booming economy but not in a downturn.”

“It also comes hard on the heels of the reports of the neglect of the repairs and maintenance of North Yorkshire’s tenanted County Farms and the £6M “black hole” on deficiencies in the physical state of our schools that I raised at the last Council meeting.”

“Once again the Council taxpayer is picking up the cost for bad project management by the Council.”