For goodness sake! Argyll and Bute Council are still pursuing the Visitor Levy idea (Campbeltown Courier, May 8) and are talking about having another public consultation about it.
We had one of those only last year, and the idea was resoundingly rejected. They paid consultants over £30,000 just to count up the numbers from that consultation and write a report. No wonder our council tax keeps rising.
Is the real reason they want a levy so that they can increase their ever-growing empire at Kilmory Castle headquarters, which they are paying a small fortune (around £5.5 million), to do up, or as they would probably phrase it, for “essential compliance and safety work”?
Do they need a bigger and better castle because they keep employing more and more layers of administration for their various schemes?
Administering and policing a levy would require additional staff and add a few more posts to the empire.
Around a third of all jobs in Argyll and Bute are now in the public sector, while the UK average is about one in five.
We’re a rural community where distance, dispersion and low population density make service delivery labour-intensive, but one third in the public sector is over the top, and the levy would only make the imbalance worse.
Instead of commissioning more consultations and expanding bureaucracy, the council should focus on the basics, such as fixing the potholes. Every resident and every visitor would benefit from that.
It’s also something the visitor levy cannot legally be used for, and something the council should already be delivering from the taxes we pay.
The more they spend on consultants and internal projects, the less they have left over for fixing potholes.
Roderick MacLeod, Seil Island.
I would like to thank everybody who voted for me in the Scottish Election and congratulate Jenni Minto on her re-election.
Although the SNP won Argyll and Bute, there was a big pro-UK majority. The close Liberal Democrat second place shows that voting for other pro-UK parties simply helped the SNP to stay in power.
The Liberal Democrats are the only party capable of challenging the SNP here in Argyll and Bute.
Alan Reid, Dunoon.
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