I like to be positive - and to use these column inches to tell readers about all the good things that are happening in this area since they elected a Conservative MP who never stops fighting their corner.
I like to provide information and updates on the £23m Towns Fund for Workington, the £11.5m Future High Street Fund for Maryport, and the £10m Levelling Up Fund for the Workington Gateway Project, for example. You'll see me talk about our new £15m Workington Community Diagnostic Centre and the £17m we're investing in and around the Port of Workington, or on projects designed to open up access to the port. This is in addition to the tens, if not hundreds, of millions to upgrade the Cumbrian Coast Railway Line announced by the Prime Minister in October.
And I was delighted to reveal at the end of last month that Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness councils are set to receive a combined total of £276m - on top of the £287m allocated to road maintenance that was announced the previous week. This is equivalent to twice Cumberland's highways budget every year, to be invested over a number of years.
I was happy to talk about the additional bus service improvement funding announced in October (that the council continue to withhold from bus services) - all of it reallocated from the HS2 project.
If you sense a 'but' coming, you would be right. Although the money has been allocated by the Government, the delivery of these infrastructure projects falls to the local authorities - and therein lies my concern.
I have serious doubts about the competence of Cumberland Council's current leadership. Can we trust a council with such a poor track record to deliver?
Cumberland Council's portfolio holder for highways even tried to stop the reallocation of HS2 funding to northern communities - she would have rather it were spent on an expensive white elephant in the Midlands.
The council's four-year capital programme is the highest ever set on the Cumberland footprint at £0.55bn, with over 80 per cent being funded directly by government through initiatives such as the High Streets Fund and Town Deals.
The council vested in April of last year and had almost a year before that as a shadow authority to realise £30m of annual savings. Instead, they have reported an overspend - whether this is £38m as originally reported, or £9m as they say it is now. And now they've come cap in hand to the Conservative Government asking permission to borrow £41m because of their inability to rationalise staffing and property.
Their budget reports say they intend to increase that to £66m, meaning as much as 15 per cent of their entire budget will go on debt repayment.
Let's be clear - this is the result of simple financial mismanagement, a failure of leadership.
Since 2015, the Government has increased pothole funding to Cumberland Council tenfold. The authority has one of the highest government-funded highways budgets in England, and it has increased by more than a third this year alone - plus that additional £130m for road maintenance.
You wouldn't think so, looking at the state of our roads: a moon buggy would arguably be more effective than a car in negotiating the lunar-sized craters on our roads. And I was staggered to see video of the shoddy, slapdash way in which maintenance teams dealt with one of the many roadside potholes - literally throwing our money away.
The local authority's shocking record has gone largely unchallenged. False claims of Government 'austerity' are reported verbatim and without question. The fact is that Cumberland's budget is now higher, in real terms, than the same footprint in 2010, while the population is lower.
Because of these well-founded fears, five Cumbrian MPs, including myself, have written to the chief executives of both unitary authorities to issue a call to action, guiding them to do the right thing.
We have asked them to use this money to start work on the Brigham and Broughton junction improvements alongside National Highways, to commence work on the Bothel strategic improvement project, and other major schemes. This investment is just what is needed to get these projects off the ground - and I will do everything I can to ensure that Cumberland Council spends this money - your money - to the best possible effect.
There is a broader solution. Cumbria's unitary authorities must take local government reform to its logical conclusion. I have repeatedly urged both leaders to embrace a lucrative mayoral devolution deal and to start talks with Government. Regrettably, they are not capitalising on these opportunities.
What we have in Cumberland is Labour councillors turning down Government funding opportunities for political ideological reasons, while pleading penury.
The introduction of a Cumbrian Mayoral Combined Authority to provide strategic vision and leadership is the obvious solution to this chaos. Anything less than that would be to forego hundreds of millions in investment and would be a betrayal of residents. A mayor can act as a local champion attracting investment to the area and acting as a powerful local voice in discussions with Government.
We have taken the horse to water. We now need to find a way to make it drink.
