COUNCILLORS are seeing red in Calstock — over the future of traditional telephone boxes!
The parish council is not going to let BT remove the two red boxes in Latchley and St Ann's Chapel which are under threat. Instead, it is going to adopt them for £1 each — even though they will contain no telephone.
The authority was given the option of sponsoring each of them for £500 a year with a telephone, adopting them for £1 without a phone or removing them completely.
After a lengthy debate, council chairman Jerome Irons decided to go out and about in his ward and see exactly what the public thought.
He said: 'I went to Latchley and talked to about 15 people, knocked on a few doors and put a sign on the telephone box.
'Everyone I spoke to wanted to keep the box but could not give a monkey's about the phone.
The red box is part of the village and people mention it when giving out directions to their houses — it is a landmark.
'I would not like to think that Latchley's phone box ended up in some rich person's house as a bar or a shower when we could keep it for £1.
Cllr Graham Parker was concerned that if visitors wanted to use the phone box in Latchley or St Ann's Chapel in an emergency there would be no phone inside. It was agreed that signs would have to be put up informing people that the box was no longer functional.
The council will have to take on the electricity bill of approximately £17 a year to light the box and be responsible for the maintenance. Cllr Irons said someone in his ward had already offered to paint the box.
There had been no feedback from residents in St Ann's Chapel about the phone box on the A390 but it was decided to keep that one as well.
There was a suggestion that the structures could be used as notice-boards or eventually sold on e-bay for £500 each, one councillor joked!