In my eight years as Chair of the Parish Council, I've held a number of roles. At one point, I was Chair, Acting Clerk and Responsible Finance Officer, a period which caused me huge levels of stress and was, in organisational terms, highly unsatisfactory. But sometimes, especially with a micro-parish, needs must. The show must, if you like, go on.
In my earlier incarnation, I was the Wildlife portfolio holder, which was a source of great amusement given that I still couldn't confidently identify even the obvious stuff and was still convinced that wolves stalked the land.
Now, I hold the portfolios for Website and Communication and Finance, which sounds harder than it is. Balancing a budget of £6,000 or so really shouldn't be that difficult, and the website isn't overly burdensome if I remain focussed.
Tonight, I've been setting payments up for authorisation - our Clerk's salary needs to be paid and invoices for our streetlighting, website, membership of the Suffolk Association of Local Councils and the drainage rates need to be settled, as well as our annual subscription with the Information Commissioner.
I've also written to our District and County Councillors to let them know what our meeting dates are for the next year - I could leave it to our Clerk but I sense that it's a better use of my time than of his (I have copied him in).
The next thing on my list is to help with preparations for our annual internal audit. We're pretty much ready, and it's as much a case of making sure that all of the invoices are readily available, that various reports have been uploaded to the Parish website and so on. We dealt with a lot of the essentials at our meeting on Monday, and our finances are healthy and properly reported, so I'm reasonably comfortable this year.
I'm also intent on preparing everything for a handover to whoever takes on my various responsibilities - I want them to not have to spend weeks wondering what on Earth I was doing.
Only a year to go...
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