A COUNCILLOR who lost a close vote to help determine the future of Haworth Fire Station has criticised "autocratic" rules used to govern debate on the issue.

Tito Arana, of Haworth, Cross Roads and Stanbury Parish Council, was one of three councillors who unsuccessfully voted in favour of the council buying the mothballed property to retain it for public use.

The council decided not to buy the building, with chairman Cllr Angel Kershaw using her casting vote to break the deadlock.

Cllr Arana said: "The chairman [Cllr Kershaw] chose for some bizarre reason to run the meeting for the first time ever by strict council guidelines.

"There was no vote for this to happen – the chairman just decided this was how the meeting would be run.

"This limited everyone to only speaking for three minutes, which was incredibly disappointing as the council was there to debate the matter not just vote on it. It didn't give us much time to voice a reasonable argument on what was the biggest decision the council has considered in quite some time."

Reacting to Cllr Arana's comments, Cllr Kershaw pointed out that restrictions on how long councillors can speak for at meetings are enforced at district council level all the time.

She added: "I imposed the three-minute rule on this occasion because I wanted everyone to have an equal opportunity to speak, without anyone dominating the debate.

"There are some forceful characters on the parish council.

"I restricted myself to three minutes as well. To be absolutely fair to everyone, when you're dealing with something as major as this, everyone should have an equal say.

"This had already been debated at our finance and overview committee, which Cllr Arana is a member of, so there has been plenty of time to discuss it."

Cllr Arana said: "I fully abide by and accept the council's democratic decision.

"Myself and two other councillors, Peter Clarke and Connor Hughes, voted to buy the building.

"The cost would have been £250,000, but this would have equated to just a 20p a week increase in every resident's precept payments to fund this over 15 years. We felt that was a price worth paying.

"We're living in difficult times and both the parish council and the residents living in our three villages need to decide if they are prepared to pay a bit more each week to continue to see services retained.

"We now have virtually no control over what will happen to the [fire station] site. Every time we pass it we'll know we could have saved it."

Cllr Kershaw responded that the sum of £250,000 was only the initial cost of buying the building, warning the total would easily have come to much more than that.

She said: "We would also have incurred costs to refurbish the building for any other use, as well as initial running costs and solicitors' fees.

"There were a lot of unknowns. As chairman of the council, I had to vote with my head not my heart because this isn't my money, it's public money."