I HAPPENED to take the shorter way across the front of the Selby District Council offices on Christmas Eve, having two handfuls of shopping and dreading having to negotiate the treacherous ice-laden footpath home.
I need not have concerned myself as the footpaths to and around the council offices were miraculously free from snow and ice with well salted and gritted paths right up to the main pathway on Portholme Road, where the gritting promptly ceased.
Obv
iously, as concerned council staff members could possibly be in danger of a fall, every precaution had been taken to ensure none of its personnel would be in a position to sue should an accident take place during this season of goodwill.
That cannot, of course, be said for the rest of Selby's footpaths or its surrounding districts, where the bout of freezing weather has seen people young and old reduced to jaywalking into traffic in order to remain on their feet to get to wherever they had to go.
If the council had been more enterprising, it could have hired out skates in the market square, which resembles a poorly-made skate park over the same period.
I find it shameful and a disgrace that both ratepayers and visitors alike could be left out in the cold in such a manner.
A change in government now cannot come soon enough – there will be no frozen footpaths once you feel the heat of an election!
S A Mason
Greenacres Crescent, Brayton
