Visiting the Borders towns is a treat at Christmas time - the lights, the festivals. Every one has a string of enteratining events, from pantomines to concerts.
Wandering around, I can't help noticing the number of buildings owned (or at least used) by Scottish Borders Council. Some of them are very pretty, especially decked out in festive colours.
In Kelso alone there must be at least half a dozen, and that's not including school buildings. We have a Victorian mini-St Pancras occupied by the 'technical services' department. A Georgian terrace where you can pick up extra rubbish bags (when it's open).
How much are all these buildings worth? Glancing at SBC's accounts, there's a very low asset valuation , and reading the notes it seems to imply this is calculated every 5 years or so.
This prompts the thought, do SBC's breaucrats need to be housed in pretty but presumably inconvenient town centre buildings? Surely more sensible to rent modern offices where they could all do whatever it is they do together. If the rubbish bag issuer was on her tea break, a services technician could hand out the purple and whites in her absence.
The SBC could sell all those pretty buildings to developers, thus alleviating the housing shortage and returning millions of pounds to coucil taxpayers at the same time.
Let us have a Borders Domesday Book-style survey of Council properties so we can find out exactly how much of a gold mine we're sitting on.
Everyone would be a winner!
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2 comments:
Methinks it will be a big book Tom!
Another excellent idea. This is just the kind of lateral thinking that makes what the Borders Party work for me.
It would be interesting to know when the last valuation took place and when the next one is due? Given the way prices have been moving it could well have doubled.
Provided the properties vacated by SBC could be put to a fit use, such as town-centre apartments, I wholly endorse Tom's suggestion.
I think the Borders Party needs to support town centres. They should have built town-centre housing in Gala instead of the multiple multiples. Ideally, the old buildings which have been bulldozed would have been made into attractive flats.
Surely town centres are more vibrant and law-abiding if folk live there?
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