Greetings from the UUP Group on Causeway Coast & Glens BC.
I noticed a week or two ago that CC & G was one of the top two places in NI where citizens were happiest to live. I don’t know that the UUP Group can claim credit for that but we can always try.
We were delighted that after the last local government elections we had 10 successful candidates with only two colleagues being unsuccessful. It was great to confound the pundits who had put us at 6 or 7. This meant we were and still are the second largest group on council, but punching well above our weight.
We have the benefit of having councillors with expertise in business, farming, manufacturing housing and indeed in the use of social media, giving the UUP group a well-balanced team.
When we look at how Republication/Nationalist controlled councils behave we are more than grateful that we have a unionist controlled one.
What success can we claim? Thankfully quite a few!
The UUP Group led and pushed strongly for the new council name to be what it is today i.e. CC&G BC as we felt that it perfectly described our iconic area and our tourism offering. We resisted any moves to employ “experts” to advise on the name at great cost unlike what happened in some council areas. This was before CC&G along with Belfast were named by Lonely Planet Guide as the top places in the world to visit in 2018.
As we are such a strong tourist area we want to grow both our domestic and international markets by showing that our visitors get a warm welcome. In February this year led by the DUP, council agreed to charge for seasonal parking in most of our tourist towns and villages namely, Portstewart, Portrush, Portballintrae, Ballintoy and Ballycastle.
The UUP group led a campaign which received province wide interest against these charges as we felt that free access to our beaches and coastal areas would benefit health and promote tourism. As the result of the call in system we succeeded in reversing this ill thought out decision. We were delighted to receive praise and recognition from all over NI for getting this resolved.
During the 2014 council elections the candidates had as one of their election promises that we would commit NOT to support any increase in the council part of the local rates in the first term of the new council. We felt that 4 councils coming together must be able to make savings for the ratepayers. The first year there was a rates increase voted through with the support of the DUP but with the UUP voting against it. Since then there has been a zero rates increase agreed with the DUP supporting us and the Republican & Nationalist groups wanting increases. We have certainly found that if there is a wasteful way to do something SF (which we have labelled the spend, spend, spend party) will want to do it usually followed by the SDLP.
Our Mayor for 2017/2018 was our own UUP councillor Joan Baird who I have to say received widespread praise for her dignity and professionalism during her year in office. Joan led a campaign to have a twice yearly council newsletter produced and this has proved very successful despite the DUP putting as many obstacles in its way as possible.
All our sitting councillors have been selected to run again in 2019 and with a number of extra UUP candidates we look forward to having a really good result again for the party. Experience does count and our group certainly has that. Personally I believe that in elections we should be judged by our past performance and not by future promises.