Junkin wants to maintain a healthy Environment in Magherafelt District

 

This week and next I will be among many of the local government candidates at the Magherafelt Council elections coming around the district’s housing estates and streets explaining their policies.

This council has traditionally had unionist representatives who were for the most part dedicated to cutting out wasteful practices. In turn our rate-payers have had generally much lower rates than other equivalent districts. I am proud to have been numbered with that unionist bloc now for six terms and hope sincerely that I will be returned for what looks like the final closing term of the present council set-up. After this, the number of councils will be cut down from twenty six to somewhere between seven and fifteen. No-one yet knows from where we will be administered  after 2009.

I want to keep pressing for better waste management which is one of the biggest   drains on our rates, what with the cost of the machinery (a bin lorry costs well over £100,000!) and the increasing levy which has to be paid into central government for every single ton of waste deposited in our local dump. Sadly, only a very small number of councillors in the past council were ever dedicated to waste issues and it has proved to be a very complicated subject.

Fortunately my past visits to installations in both Sweden and Germany along with other council-paid courses on pollution management put me in a strategic position to argue the rate-payers case to the benefit of the ground-water supply, the air-quality and the ultimate monetary cost to us all. I want to put that hard-earned experience to good use to see that all of our future generations have a clean healthy environment in which to live, work and play. It will only happen if we seriously work at it from now on!

I therefore respectfully ask the Moyola Electors for their Number 1 support for me at this election in order to see it all through.