My adjourned motion at Novembers Full Council meeting;
As the council’s members are uninformed as to what land and property is owned by Kildare County Council, despite members requests for same since 2014, that the council provide its elected representatives with the most up to date land and property asset registry, containing but not limited to the type of information that would be produced for reports to Government Departments including the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government.
Here is the report Issued by: Ms S Kavanagh, Director of Services, Economic, Cultural and Community Development: The Property Interest Register (PIR) was established to create and maintain a central database of all land-based assets owned by Kildare County Council. The Local Government Audit Service has oversight of PIR (the web-based software package used by the project team) and the controls and protocols around it. Some of the sites captured in PIR were acquired by a number of sections for various statutory purposes e.g. housing development, amenity use. The PIR project team does not manage or maintain these sites; it simply captures their details centrally for financial management purposes.
Decisions on the current and future use of these assets still rest with the acquiring sections, where most central government reports and other returns are compiled.
In addition to these ‘development’ sites, hundreds of other plots have been acquired by Kildare County Council in the 120-year period since the establishment of local authorities. Most of these plots were acquired for specific purposes such as cemeteries or road schemes and are not available for any other use.
The capture of all historical data and current transactions is a huge undertaking. The PIR acquired over 4,000 maps from Land Registry in 2009 including plots and plans in both of the previously-outlined categories. To date, about 3,100 records have been created in the Property Interest Register, consisting of text harvested from physical files and corresponding GIS maps, which are being uploaded on an ongoing basis by an in-house Technician. The completion date for this work will depend on the technical and administrative resources available to the project in the short to medium term. A report containing all GIS and text entries in the PIR system would be a complex and voluminous file in any format. It would also contain commercially sensitive information and details defined as personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation.
The Property Interest Register team is happy to assist elected representatives and other parties with queries and searches relating to specific towns, areas and/or municipal districts.
The Property Interest Register team deals with up to 20 queries of this nature per month.