Last summer, despite a public outcry, the Conservative-run Harborough District Council closed the public lavatories in St Mary's Place, Market Harborough to save �15,000.
Today the Leicester Mercury reports that the council is paying contractors �53,000 a year to clean the town's other public conveniences on the Commons car park. That does not include the cost of labour.
This was discovered by Lib Dem councillor Barbara Johnson, who told the Mercury she was "staggered" by the amount:
"The Focsa charge for the Commons toilets is an eye-watering amount which does not include routine maintenance.
"I would clean the lavatories myself for a lot less than a �1,000 a week. I cannot understand how they could possibly cost so much to clean."
Long-standing readers will be familiar with
Focsa and the company's rather eventful relationship with Harborough District Council in recent years.
Barbara Johnson wrote to the council seeking an explanation for these extraordinary costs. She was told in a reply from its deputy chief executive that:
The cleansing cost of �53,000 for the Commons car park toilets is straight from the contract as the tendered figure.
There is no breakdown of the figure. This is the amount the contractor put in the tender to provide the specified service.
A council spokesman also told the Mercury that he could not give a breakdown of the cost or say how often the toilets are cleaned. The newspaper quotes him as saying:
This figure includes costings for an attendant to oversee cleanliness, materials and all chemicals, supplies and equipment for cleaning.
To which Barbara Johnson replies:
"It can't include employment costs because they are accounted elsewhere at just �100 a week.
"They must be using some pretty expensive cleaning materials."
Whether the council is stonewalling or has simply been taken for a ride remains to be seen. Liberal England is on the case.
The good news is Market Harborough has won the internet poll to decide which town will be twinned with Aleksandr Orlov's home village of Meerkovo for a day.
The result was announced earlier today in
The Meerkovian:
Whilst competition was fierce, Market Harborough emerged as the clear winner, receiving over 60% of the thousands of votes cast.
The bad news is that, incredibly, that day will be tomorrow, Thursday 24 February.
Meerkovo is part of the most popular advertising campaign in the country, and associating Market Harborough with that campaign would surely be a good way of promoting the town.
But what chance does anyone in Harborough have to respond with only one day's notice? We should have T-shirts, balloons, fireworks, champagne, a special issue of the local paper... I can't see much of that happening now. This has to count as a major lost opportunity.
We were told that the date of the twinning day would be "agreed with the winner". Who, exactly, in Market Harborough agreed that it should be tomorrow and how do we get rid of them? And what is going to happen to the "donation of �5000 to be used for community purposes"? I think we should be told.
I had intended to take the twinning day off to report the bunting and frolics for this blog. But now I shall have to be at work and will miss whatever fun it is possible to arrange at such short notice.
Niall Sullivan is the editor of Market Harborough People.
For many years I have wanted to be a journalist one way or the other. I imagined working on a top newspaper or magazine reporting on world events or, as I had planned for many years, reporting on football matches.
However, after three years of university my eyes were opened to the changing world of the media industry. Stories of newspapers cutting staff numbers were starting to become a regular occurrence. Sub-editors were some of the first to go, leaving journalists less time to leave the office and find stories, as they now had to edit their own work.
With this squeeze on the number of journalists working at newspapers and magazines it was becoming obvious that it would be a lot tougher than I thought to break into this very competitive industry.
It is not all doom and gloom though. A new form of news website has been growing in popularity over the past few years. Hyperlocal news sites have been popping up all over the country, concentrating on the news that matters in their local community.
Journalist Mark Glaser says that �Hyperlocal news is the information relevant to small communities or neighbourhoods that has been overlooked by traditional news outlets.� Many people have taken this concept and created their own news sites, with original content being displayed.
I saw this at first hand while at university. My friend Josh Halliday set up SR2 Blog, which is an outstanding piece of work in terms of content produced and the way that it is set up. He splits the news between different neighbourhoods and reports on such matters as community meetings and sports matches. He focuses on the areas that people want to read and discuss, and that is key to what these websites are about.
Another site that has impressed me is thelinconite.co.uk. Set up by three students who struggled to find work after leaving university, it has a readership of 15,000 and has even launched an Iphone application. It was started only in May last year and is already providing strong competition for the local newspaper, the Lincolnshire Echo.
The final example I am going to give is one that is very close to my heart. Northcliffe Media have launched over 150 Local People sites across the UK, and are due to launch more in the very near future. The main selling point of these sites are that they aren�t just a platform for the journalist running them, but also give the opportunity for members to upload news, discussions and events themselves. These sites give the means for people to become �citizen� journalists, providing news content that matters most to them and discussing issues which surround the main stories in a town.
I run Market Harborough People and after a month I feel that is coming along nicely. After just one month the site has had just under 1300 unique visitors and over time I think this number will go up significantly as the locals find out the potential of what the site can do to promote issues and news in Market Harborough.
With a media giant such as Northcliffe beginning to invest large amounts of money in hyperlocal sites, then we could all be looking at a different landscape for the places we read the news in future years. They certainly have potential to be a significant part of local news coverage.
The Harborough Mail tells us that the winner to find a British twin for Aleksandr Orlov's home village will be announced at 3 p.m. on Wednesday 23 February.
The good news is that
As the poll closed, [Meerkat] Harborough was still being recorded in first place with 59 per cent of the total votes cast for the five contenders.
I don't want the air to be thick with prematurely counted chickens coming home to roost, but it looks as though there will not be dancing in the streets of Windemeer, Meerkat Drayton, Weston-Super-Meer or Downham Meerkat on Wednesday night.
