Our chief reporter Tristan Stewart-Robertson takes a look at the latest full council meeting where the local authority's finances were the main topic of discussion...


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IF I had a nickel for every time a West Dunbartonshire Council (WDC) political party blamed someone else for the budget gap, I still wouldn’t come close to filling the hole.

An equally constant complaint is local authorities are underfunded and have been for years. It’s never been this bad for WDC, but it’s certainly not new.

Fourteen years of real-terms cuts from the Scottish Government and 12 years of cuts from Westminster leave plenty of blame to go around.

Council officers are meanwhile left to balance the books no matter what - even at the cost of axing colleagues.

While Jim Bollan has consistently protested for years that a rebellious budget should be passed on what they NEED, legally the authority can’t do that.

So we’re left with the annual mess of Holyrood and Westminster doing annual funding announcements, forcing councils to beg for more while making more cuts - all while, certainly, any central government is happy to waste millions, probably to the benefit of someone in the House of Lords.

Every local politician would agree that this can’t go on. All public services are already struggling and the latest WDC budget is an annual repeat of “no good options”. We’re past trying to trim the fat and instead extract the marbling. And if you’re able to do that cleanly, I’ll give you a nickel.