Brighton and Hove City Council is today (Friday 4 March) printing council tax bills for the coming year.
They will be for the same amount as last year.
The council tax was set at a stormy meeting at Brighton Town Hall last night.
It was one of the big decisions of the night along with the passing of the budget for 2011-12.
This was by no means a foregone conclusion.
Labour and the Greens joined forces to force through two sets of amendments.
The two opposition parties have 13 councillors each, outnumbering the 25 Conservatives. There is also a Liberal Democrat councillor and an independent former Lib Dem.
The Conservatives decided to swallow their pride and accept the amended budget at the cost of their centerpiece cut in council tax bills.
But the Greens wanted to vote down the entire budget – even after they had amended it – and have more time to analyse it before an emergency budget meeting in a week’s time.
Labour abstained when the final vote came.
Councillor Gill Mitchell said after the meeting that she and her colleagues had not wanted to risk losing the changes that her party and the Greens had jointly secured.
Those changes included
- freezing council tax at its present level instead of cutting it by 1 per cent as the Conservatives had proposed
- axing the £1.1 million of funds set aside to remove the controversial cycle lanes in The Drive and Grand Avenue in Hove
- overturning a third headline-grabbing measure mooted by the Tories by freezing residents’ parking charges instead of cutting them by 5 per cent
Money will be diverted from these amendments into – among other things – the budget for schools, children’s services and adult social care.
Read the main budget paperwork here and the addendum containing the proposed amendments here. The two joint Green and Labour amendments were the onlyones to be approved.
