Dear Editor,

You have recently published some letters about the state of the roads in Ross. We stood as candidates and were elected as Councillors last year on a promise to combat the neglect of Ross and to fight for a better deal. The awful state of our roads was an important element of that fight.

Once in post, we were amazed to discover that we had inherited a situation where the Balfour Beatty re-surfacing plan for Ross was to not re-surface a single yard of road in an entire year !

We are not blaming Balfour Beatty for this. They are allocated money by the County Council to do a job and that money has greatly reduced in the last few years. Since the financial year 2011/12, the government grant to the County Council has gone from £60 million to a piddling £600,000 this year.

We have been battling with Balfour Beatty and the County Council to get more resources for Ross. But we have come to the conclusion that asking nicely has a limited effect. So we are also putting forward an amendment to the County Council budget, to be set next Friday, to allocate an additional £3 million to the County’s Market Towns, including of course Ross. If we can get that passed, we might be able to get some real improvements in the state of the town’s roads.

Whatever the result of Friday’s vote, we will carry on doing our best for Ross.

Councillor Chris Bartrum

Councillor Louis Stark

Councillor Paul Symonds