Serious assault in Acomb: Two charged A 19-year-old man and a 16-year-old youth are due at York Magistrates’ Court today at 9.15am, court room 1, to face a joint charge of unlawful and malicious wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm (Section 18 – Wounding with Intent).
The 50-year-old victim is in a critical but stable condition at Leeds General Infirmary.
City of York Council is notifying its customers that reception services at 9 St Leonard’s Place will be temporarily relocated ahead of the opening of its new Customer Centre at West Offices in March this year.
The following services will be moving to new temporary locations:
· Parking Services: On the morning of Monday 28 January the reception for all parking related services and enquiries will close and will reopen at 12pm at Customer Services Library Square, alongside services for Council Tax, Benefits, Housing and Housing Options.
·The main reception at 9 St Leonard’s Place will close at 2pm on Thursday 31 January and will reopen on Friday 1 February in the Brierley Room on the ground floor at York Explore, Museum Street. Reception Services relocating to York Explore are:
·Planning
·Building Control
·Land Charges
·Waste and Recycling
·Transport Planning
·Concessionary Travel including National Bus Passes (senior and disability), Yozone cards and Senior Persons Rail cards
·Conservation and Listed Buildings
·Highways
·Network Management
·Licensing and Taxi Licensing
·City Development
·Education (including school meals, uniform grants, admissions and school transport).
Customers with urgent queries or service requests about any of these services during the short periods of closure on 28 and 31 January are asked to call the council on 01904 551550.
Bus users in and around York are being asked for their views on proposed changes to the city’s bus network at a consultation event taking place next month.
Members of the public are invited to attend a public forum on Friday 8 February at York Explore Library Learning Centre’s cafe, between 10am and 12.30pm, to comment or put questions to York’s bus operators and the council’s transport team about the city’s bus services.
It provides an opportunity for residents to argue for the route of the number 4/5 to be changed to take in Front Street and Ridgeway.
Residents can also support the campaign aimed at forcing the Council and bus operators to published reliability statistics for the routes that they operate in the City.
Residents can also email their views or comments to: transport.planning@york.gov.uk. Responses must be received by the end of Friday 8 February.
City of York Council will be carrying out clearance works, from this week, in the area surrounding the A59 and Tadcaster Road to prepare for the new Park & Ride sites at Poppleton Bar and Askham Bar.
The council will be clearing vegetation in and around the A59/A1237, the A59/Station Road junctions and A64 Slip Road/Tadcaster Road junction to prepare for one of the largest single investments in York’s transport infrastructure.
The works will take place over the next two weeks, and weather permitting, aim to be completed by week ending Friday 8 February. The clearance work has been timed so that nesting birds will not be affected by the main construction works.
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The North Yorkshire fire and Rescue service are consulting on the level of Council Tax that they should levy for the 2013/14 year.
The Authority which meets on 13th February to make a decision is not proposing any reduction is service quality. Background papers can be found by clicking here.
Click here to see images of people recently caught on CCTV cameras who the police would like to identify
The amount likely to be spent on community support (mainly home care) is set to break the York Council budget this year. Expenditure of £6.6 million is being reported against a budget of £3.8 million.
Direct payments (where clients make their own care arrangements from a given budget) are set to exceed its £2.6 million budget by £0.4 million.
The residential car budget will also be overspent by £470,000.
These are amongst the worst projected budget outturn figures ever reported to a Social Services meeting which is being held only 2 months before the end of the financial year.
An officer report on the crisis says, “the Homecare service has been substantially redesigned and has been successful in signposting customers with low level needs to other forms of provision. This has meant that the number of customers has remained stable despite the growth in the number of potential customers, but it does also mean that the customers receiving the service have more complex needs.
This is one reason why, despite unit costs going down following the outsourcing of the service weekly, spend on our home care contracts has increased from £54k a week in July 2011 to £82k a week in December 2012.
In March 2011 there were 553 customers receiving 7 hours a week home care on average.
There are currently 720 customers (on the tiered contracts alone) receiving an average of 8.1 hours of care per week”.
The York Council is due to announce in early February its budget plans for the forthcoming year. It is likely to increase Council tax levels by 2% and spurn government offers of additional grant aid.
It will need to act decisively if it is to bring the quality and costs of social services back under control
