IT is very hard not to sympathise with our many public servants who are becoming increasingly imaginative in the way they make their ends meet.

An outsider looking in on local government may be bewildered to find a public servant trying to seek a sponsor to enable a person to be employed who will then seek a grant which will enable someone else to be employed so that they can seek a sponsor to cover the bulk of the cost of a major local project.

There are so many pots of Lottery cash, European cash, regional development agency cash, quango cash, central government cash etc that public servants have to be expert in sniffing out these pots of cash.

That is why the hoardings announcing what is about to be built on a site are always covered with a plethora of logos as each source of money tries to get its name known to prove it is doing a worthwhile job.

Similarly, most of the region's roundabouts have a sponsor's name attached to them. It is usually a local business which has chipped in a few quid to buy some flowers in return for having its logo displayed where the traffic can see it.

Some councils are now considering extending this idea to lamp-posts which would make very visible advertising hoardings.

In other parts of the region it is not unusual to see police vehicles with sponsors' names on the sides - just yesterday we reported that the company BASF had sponsored two mountain bikes for police in Thornaby.

All of these imaginative ideas are because tax-payers, moaning about council tax rates and the central government's very visible stealth taxes, don't want to pay any more.

Yet some ideas go that little bit too far, and North Yorkshire Police's suggestion that non-emergency calls might cost up to £1.50-a-minute is one such idea.

Advice on crime prevention and personal safety really should be available for free, and a premium line may well encourage people to overload the cheaper 999 service.

And, of course, it would make us all feel like we were on some silly TV reality show, like I'm A Criminal...Let Me Out Of Here.