Which bright spark thought that spending £35,000 on this

was value for money?

It’s fair to say that the Market Place was never going to look good this year no matter how hard anyone tried to dress it up for Christmas.
But are we alone in thinking that with £35,000 being thrown at this year’s Christmas lights we might have expected something a little better?
Even Councillor Derek Richmond, the borough’s town centre Czar, appeared to damn them with faint praise on BBC Radio Lincolnshire ahead of Thursday’s switch-on ceremony.
“I think they’re the best value we could get,” he said. “Even with the £10,000 extra from Boston BID (bringing the total spend to £35,000) we only had two companies that could come in within our budget.”
It’s not easy to fathom out just how the cost of the lights breaks down.
We understand that the council’s £25,000 covers all costs associated with the Christmas lights.
Presumably this includes the electricity – which last year cost  £2,060.
On top of that, Boston Business Improvement District is paying an extra £10,000 this year and next.
During negotiations, big discounts were offered to the council to extend the  planned three year contract to five years - and the council is never one to miss a good deal when they see one!
The borough (that's us, the ratepayers) will pay £25,000 for the five years of the contract.  Boston BID will contribute £20,000 in total - £10,000 this year and next - bringing the total to £145,000.
At the time of the new contract, we were told that some of the lights in use last year were as much as 40 years old – which suggested that they were owned by the council rather than hired … but if that was the case .... why was the annual cost so high?
Given that the new lights are available on a five year deal, does this mean that they are “rented” – in which case they work out very expensive.
The company which was awarded the contract – Festive Lighting – displays a selection of lights for different budgets on its website – which you can see below …

click on photo to see enlargement

The “large” budget examples are priced at £20,000-plus, and given that the borough is spending almost twice that amount, we would have expected to see quite a lot more for our money.
So would our readers.

My expectations may have been goaded to an unreasonable level by an ever enthusing Councillor Richmond over the airwaves of Radio Lincolnshire, but I'm afraid to say the new lighting scheme represents an expensive lack of imagination. An expensive lack of imagination which perfectly reflects that of our august council in just about every other area. A very effective visual aid, I have to say.

Very disappointing, but a perfect compliment to the already very drab and equally disappointing Market Place revamp. 

Amongst other things, I fail to see the point in decorating what is essentially a construction site (Market place) and a place most people go out of their way now to avoid, with Christmas lighting.

One of our readers sent in the following photos which perfectly illustrate the comments above.

click on photo to see enlargement

We accept that the predictable reaction of many of our readers will be to say that Boston Eye is simply criticising for its own sake -  but we wonder how many of our councillors could put their hands on their hearts and say that they are really pleased with this much-hyped display, and feel that it is good value for money?

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