Fingal County Councillors yesterday agreed to amend the County’s Budget to provide funding for three particular areas:

Climate action.

Many of the actions in the Council’s Climate Change Action Plan are marked as “awaiting budget.” These include important measures to reduce emissions and to tackle the impact of climate change including flooding and coastal erosion. The Council decided to allocate a further €320,000 towards these unfunded actions.

Parking enforcement aimed at improving the safety of vulnerable road users.

At the moment the only parking enforcement which the Council operates is in areas where it has parking charges. The Council has allocated €150,000 for additional parking enforcement. The need for parking enforcement to protect people walking and cycling, especially children going to school, is very evident across the County. We are glad that a majority in the Council have agreed that it is not tenable for the Council to fail to exercise its power to enforce parking law. We have set a clear policy direction in the budget that this enforcement is to be directed at safety of vunerable road users.

Noise abatement.

The Council’s Noise Action Plan has longstanding actions to provide noise barriers to protect residents near the M50 and N3 from traffic noise. Over the course of two plans, no work has been done to implement these actions. The Council agreed to our proposal to allocate €50,000 for the detailed study required to draw up the noise mitigation measures.

Funding to come from vacant properties rates refund

The measures are to be funded by reducing the rates refund on empty commercial properties from 50% to 40%. Reductions in the rates refund for vacant properties have been driven by Green councillors over the last 4 years, aimed at getting vacant properties reoccupied by businesses or converted to badly needed housing.