Cash should be spent more fairly

A report to tonight's meeting of the borough council Overview and Scrutiny Policy and Projects Committee includes an update on how local people can have a say in spending £100,000 in their neighbourhoods as part of Project Placecheck.
As usual, there's a lot of waffle in the report, but the nub of it is that five neighbourhoods in three wards - Central, Pilgrim and Witham, will benefit from work below ward level in neighbourhoods in and around the town centre area.
Each of the five gets £10,000 , which accounts for half the money involved ... and it's not quite clear what happens to the other half.
Once again, we have to raise an eyebrow, because the focus is - as always - on the town centre.
It seems a shame that the bulk of ratepayers who live outside this narrow zone never seem to benefit and see their own areas improved.
And there's no justification in the argument that these are areas of particular need.
The plan for the next area to benefit - High Street South - lists among the residents' schedule of bad things about the area items such as: pavements need cleaning, bins need emptying, lighting improvements are needed, dog fouling, drugs, boarded up and derelict buildings, fly tipping, too many cars, people leaving glass bottles lying about, pot holes, illegal and bad car parking, problem with rats, waste land, blocked drains, drunks on Friday and Saturday evenings, wheelie bins left in street.
We don't know about you, but we think that this list could apply to pretty well every part of Boston, and we wonder how it was that just five small areas were picked out to benefit from improvement when the rest of the town suffers equally.
We would also argue that this money is being spent on what the council should already be doing across the borough as a whole as part of its duties to taxpayers.
It seems a shame that a scheme designed to benefit the town's residents and bring a long overdue smartening up to improve our quality of life may well actually produce a two tier society with some sections benefiting from improvements for no particular reason.

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