Dear Friends,
I thought it was time I wrote
to clarify where the campaign to save the Drill Hall fits within the Retain-Refurbish-Reuse campaign.
The campaign for the
Drill Hall still exists as a separate entity, it is in full support of the aims
of 3Rs as they exist at the moment but it is not going to disappear into the
larger campaign. Neither does the aim to save the Drill Hall limit the ideas 3Rs
are willing to consider, the Drill Hall is just one of the buildings on the
site. It is therefore incorrect and foolish of people to try to claim that 3Rs
are only concerned with saving the Drill Hall no matter what effect that has on
the other users of Port Royal.
It is also wrong to suggest that those who
want to save the Drill Hall want to do so any price. The reasoning behind saving
the Drill hall is that it will be an asset to the town, not that everything
which has ever been built should be kept. If I didn't believe that there were
many viable uses for the hall I would just be advocating it being properly
recorded before demolition to free up the space.
The 3Rs campaign has
garnered a lot of support, around 2,000 signatures so far. Being part of this
campaign is the best way forward for the Drill Hall at the moment. However,
there has also been a lot of vitriol aimed at the campaign and we need to help
counter that. All of us need to have facts at our fingertips so that we can
correct unsubstantiated allegations from those who want to demolish everything
at Port Royal and start again.
One comment which seems to be being made
quite frequently is that EDDC spent a lot of money to acquire the Drill Hall and
that the District as a whole needs some sort of pay back for this. The figure
quoted is £600,000.
There are two fallacies in this position. One is that the
total cost to EDDC of the land swap and building of replacement facilities for
the Cadets was £550,000 according to the Herald report at the time, the other is that every part of
East Devon receives and contributes the same amount to the
District.
Sidmouth was promised when the planning application for
Sanditon was passed that £1.5 million would go from that development into
affordable housing in Sidmouth and to the tourist economy in Sidmouth to make up
for the loss of hotel accommodation. Over the years this changed and most of the
money has gone to the District, investing in a revived Drill Hall would be 'pay
back' for this loss.
Of course Sidmouth will also lose when all the
Council employment moves from the town to elsewhere, and the proposed Knowle
developments give practically nothing back. It is worth noting that the new CIL
payments, even if they apply to any Knowle redevelopment, have to be split
between town and District because it is a Community Infrastructure Levy. The
town would get 15% of the money ( increasing to 25% if we have a Neighbourhood
Plan in place) and bear all of the loss. The same would apply, of course, to any
redevelopment at Port Royal: do not be fooled that a great deal of the money
would benefit the town or go towards paying for the sea defences.
The
meeting of the Port Royal Reference Group tonight (21st Sept 2017) is therefore
of huge importance to the town. They are the ones who were supposed to be
informing the Consultants and making sure they didn't come up with inappropriate
ideas, but couldn't as they only met them once before the day the ideas were
shown to the public.
It is to be hoped that the public response to the
Consultation has given the Reference Group more status and that they will feel
able to move the proposals into a more acceptable track. However, this statement on the EDDC website is not heartening. It
acknowledges the Consultant's survey and the Neighbourhood Plan survey but
completely ignores the petition which numerically almost equals both put
together.
Kind regards,
Mary |
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