So just how expensive is yellow paint?

There are a number of sites around the ward that desperately need some yellow paint - increases in the yellow lines around junctions like Corrie Rd/Davy Road, or putting in new yellow lines at junctions like Chalmers Road/Birdwood Road, and outside Ruth Bagnall court - all areas where people probably know they shouldn't park, but there currently isn't anything indicating this is the case, so people park there anyway.

County Council is claiming it has no budget for this work, and this is extremely frustrating. The problem is that the cost of putting down a bit of yellow paint seems to be out of all proportion to what you might expect. 

At St Margarets square, which has required a bit of yellow paint for years, the cost is estimated at £1,500. I simply cannot understand why it is so expensive. Yes, you have to agree and advertise a TRO (Traffic restriction order), and the contractors for this type of work seem to be as rare as reliable plumbers in the era before we discovered Poland, but even taking all this into account the costs look ridiculous. And if nothing else, the amount of time the bureacrats at the Council spend considering and shifting from one set of agenda papers to the next these various requests, you would have thought they could just get on with it.

I have asked for further details of why this costs so much, to see if the system can be streamlined - are we paying too much for statutory advertising? What are the contractual arrangements with those who will actually do the work - are we being ripped off? And finally, the County Council is extremely good at making the wholly inadequate funding from government go a long way, but in this case it is time to bite the bullet, pay to get in a job lot of yellow paint and fix all these problems in one go...