Monmouthshire’s cabinet members are to meet on Thursday 10th October to discuss the financial challenges facing the county next year and beyond. The council needs to save £9m next year with a total of £23m to be found over the next three years.
Cabinet will be presented with a number of proposals to save money and will be asked to confirm their desire for officers to continue to develop each of them.
Communities will play a big part in the budget process as the council conducts community engagement exercises this month at Monmouth, Caldicot, Abergavenny, Chepstow and Usk. The ideas debated by Cabinet will be presented for wider opinion in these sessions.
Formal budget proposals will be worked on over the next few months and a final budget will be agreed at the end of February next year.
Councillor Phil Murphy, cabinet member with responsibility for finance said:
“This is a difficult time for all local authorities and Monmouthshire is no exception. We are used to low settlements as the lowest funded authority in Wales but this situation presents us with some very hard decisions. We will do everything that we can to protect services and try to find alternative ways to provide them wherever we can.”
Council Leader, Cllr Peter Fox said:
“I am urging people to get involved with this process, we want to engage with our communities and share with them some of our ideas that could help us to close our funding gap. We want to listen to our residents and find out what is important to them, this will be invaluable to us as we form our budget proposals for consultation later in the year.”
Cabinet papers can be found on www.monmouthshire.gov.uk.
