Chief Executive Blog - February 2015

Colleagues,

February means it is budget time again as elected members set out the council’s spending programme for the year ahead. We can be reasonably confident that next week’s budget meeting will not produce too many dramatic headlines and that its impact on frontline services and your day-to-day jobs will be minimal.

However, looking to the future we are faced with a quart-into-a-pint-pot conundrum as we try to reconcile undiminished responsibility on the council’s part with increasing demand and reduced funding. We will be faced with a difficult juggling act over the next few years but I know that staff will face those challenges with the same steely determination that has seen us through the past few years.

The integration of health and social care services – a mammoth undertaking – is also high on the CMT agenda, as is a review of the council’s workload to assist heads of service and managers in terms of prioritising all the various and competing demands on the council.

Since my last blog I had the pleasure of meeting young art students from all over Europe who are now living in Moray and studying at the Glasgow School of Art’s Institute of Design Innovation at the Forres Enterprise Park. They are there by choice and those I spoke to were delighted with what they had found since arriving in Moray. I hope that everyone makes them feel very welcome while they are here.

Another outing during January was to the Clavie at Burghead, a ceremony which never loses its appeal, despite the wild and windy weather coming in off the sea. It is always reassuring to see familiar faces there, year in, year out.

I was delighted to learn how well the council’s new Fit Life? membership scheme for its sport and leisure facilities, with nearly 700 individual and family memberships taken out in the first month alone. Health and fitness is one of my personal priorities for the New Year and I’m looking forward to taking part in a 10k race at Forres with some council colleagues in May. It will my first 10k for five or six years. As I start my build-up for the event I will be following the guidance of Gareth Jenkins, the council’s Walk Jog Run co-ordinator, via his regular fitness column in the Northern Scot.

Finally, my odyssey to Moray’s Highland League football grounds has been put on ice – literally. I had hoped to make match day at Victoria Park in Buckie and Kynoch Park in Keith but, like the games themselves, that has had to be postponed until the weather improves.