In the Roysse Room this evening there was a Meeting of Abingdon-on-Thames Town Council. These are my jottings …
Abingdon-on-Thames was given a special award for the Corporate Use of Heraldry for their use of the town’s heraldic symbol.
We heard that The Mayor, Angela Lawrence sat unperturbed when a rat ran out at a recent event she attended.
A grant was awarded to the Foyer for £5,000 to support additional opportunities for residents (sport, job seeking, community involvements, trips etc). The Foyer gives accommodation to young homeless people and often helps to turn their lives around.
A grant of £10,000 was given to Abingdon Rugby Club towards urgent ground work to their pitches.
Councillor Alice Badcock was congratulated for organising Fun and Music in the Park.
The architects have come back with revised costings for the Guildhall development after the failure to secure a lottery grant. The improvements to the frontage and foyer area have been dropped. What remains is a modular design :
- 100 seat cinema
- Abbey Hall including removable racked seats
- Lift to some but not all historic rooms
- Bar cafe area in the lower ground floor lobby and offices where the old bar was.
The costs are still in the range of £3,500,000 – £4,000,000 because of inflation so don’t seem that much lower. The design was described as ‘modular’ and ‘pick and mix’. If funding cannot be found for one option such as the cinema then it may be dropped. Exploratory meetings are to go ahead to see if a cinema operator partner will help with funding.
The annual accounts did show that The Guildhall costs £224,362 to run in 2014 and £148,831 in 2013 (excludes income). But on questioning it was discovered that a large part of the difference was the £30K gas bill. Both gas bills were paid in 2014.
The Museum are producing a book about WWI in Abingdon to go with their exhibition starting on 4th August (exactly 100 years from when the war was declared).
The MG Garden is now complete and the Mayor will open it in the near future.
The solar powered Christmas Trees have been put up for sale by the contractor as they did not perform too well for Abingdon-on-Thames.
A new working group is to be set up to find land for a new cemetery. There is 10-15 years left of Grave Space and it will take five years to set up a new cemetery. If the town counncil did run out of room then the district council are ultimately responsible for burials but that could mean Abingdon residents getting buried in Wantage or Faringdon.
” If funding cannot be found for one option such as the cinema then it can be dropped. ”
sorry, does that mean the cinema may not go ahead if they cannot find a cinema company to back it?
Thie cinema point was one raised by one councillor. Before the hue and cry begins, there are categorically no plans to drop the cinema which is actually a really important aspect of the funding of the overall scheme.
The Guildhall project is a slow motion car crash. Despite the gas bill explanation the cost of running the building is escalating rapidly and the chances of finding a commercial operator who’ll stump up the cash to make this fantasy a reality are remote. A sad end for this folly has been obvious for a long time excepting to those who are in deep denial. It’s time to be brave, Iain, and stop throwing good money after bad.
The financial numbers backstreeter refers to are the costs only and are misleading as they ignore income. The net subsidy, which is contained in the management accounts which were reviewed earlier in the year is stable at the previously communicated level of £150k.
There is no new information from this meeting on this topic, which just ratified recommendations from the previously reported guildhall meeting which I commented on extensively.
I squarely disagree with newcomer’s view but he’s entitled to an opinion.
So because of inflation the ‘revised’/cropped plans are going to cost almost exactly the same as the old plan! Cut the losses now, no cinema operator will fund this and then the cinema will be dropped and we’ll be paying for a £4M (allowing for further inflation/extended costs) refurbishment of a building that still won’t get used, and won’t have a cinema, even though that’s what it was sold to the public as going to be! At the very least get a cinema operator to commit for a long term contract before any more money is spent! If you can’t then drop it now?
I could write another book on this daft project, but it won’t make a scrap of difference, it will go ahead, despite everyone’s best efforts to convince our leaders to the contrary. I just don’t get politicians thinking, they get voted in on a platform of best representing the views of their electorate, then go off on a tangent on the basis that once in office they can do what they heck want ?
Steve – i must have missed the vote where ‘everybody’ elected you as their spokesman
Ha ha, its a blog Ian. not a referendum, lucky for you it is too, at the moment your four nill down !
Whilst I’m sure your heart is in the right place Iain, I’m also sure that a lot more of us agree with Steve, than with you.
a special award for the Corporate Use of Heraldry?
You could not make it up.
Don’t forget the guildhall was bequeathed to the town by the last vale administration because they couldn’t get it to break even. The town council have done their best. With bad decisions on the old gaol and guildhall the previous administration owe the current admistration of all parties an apology for making such a complete mess – where is the promised money from the old gaol ?
Can I just check, so the Guildhall pulls in £100k per year in hire fees?
ie the running costs are £250k and it loses £150k?
Team Steve King!
I really wish Steve would put himself up for local election but I doubt that he will as most of him words here seem to suggest that Abingdon is going to the dogs and frankly a cr*p place to live.
For those of us who think the place is lovely and want to see it move forward with smiles and a harmonious community, this is rather disappointing and frustrating.
Have you noticed that every time Backstreeter posts about something lovely happening in the town which as been enjoyed by a majority or minority, those post get no comments? Why is that when those are the things we should be rallying behind and talking up.
Can we please have some more measured responses and a perhaps a little less bashing?
James – broadly correct – its slightly different due to a gas bill where we received 2.5 years cost in one year which distorted the figures somewhat.
The net picture is £150k subsidy
Rachel – well said
Iain,
So you are pulling in just £2k a week for letting the rooms?
I think you would do better to invest in a proper commercial management of the assets than building “stuff”.
the current website does not even give the basics for room bookings such as:
1. Price
2. Availability
3. Ability to book.
Without the above you have in essence lost most commercial bookings, and put off most others.
The rooms must either be empty (which seems unlikely, whenever I have tried to book, I have been told “busy that day” or similar) or hugely under-priced, again my experience in booking rooms there has been they have been unbelievably cheap. I think I hired the whole of the Roycee room once for a morning for something like £30, including a member of staff setting up the room (!) I couldn’t get over how cheap it was. This was 5 years ago, so hopefully this sort of thing no longer happens.
I also wonder if you haven’t got the basics right in your accounts such as accruing for the missing gas costs to the point its distorting the accounts if there is any proper account of the council’s use of the rooms? Or do they “free-ride” and get the rooms for free or heavily discounted? This too will give a false sense of the loses, but pushing the loses onto the Guildhall accounts and the the relevant “free-rider”.
NB this is not “bashing” this is trying to help people who clearly are not very commercially minded to keep what I think is a great asset to the community.
Hi Rachel, et, a thought about backstreeter and his choice of content? it may be that some of his content is deliberately featured to promote debate? of course this is Abingdons most valuable site, not just in terms of giving us accurate info about what’s on, or reporting on whats gone, but it is, like or not, a valuable platform for all things Abingdon? Think of this please? 169 houses gained planning along the Drayton rd because the new Incumbents (the Tory’s) forgot (or deliberately forgot) to submit a new draft plan to replace the expired one created by the outgoing Lib/Dems. during the time the developer took the plan to appeal, the new regime submitted a new draft plan (which is the blue print for development in the vale) Q, why didn’t the new draft include/protect the land along the Drayton rd from future development (remember the previous application didn’t get final approval) so now the new owners have submitted a new application because once more our politicians didn’t act, what’s more, the Vale have just given, yes given, Tilsey Park to Abingdon school, Tilsey park is about the same size as the plot on the Drayton rd, Q2, so why didn’t the Vale sell, yes sell, Tilsey park to the developer? it could have swelled the vales pot by several million pounds and put 169 houses closer to schools, roads and all the other “stuff” the north of Abingdon has that the south does not?
Hi James
You make some good points which have in the main been looked at. I’ve addressed most of them on previous debates on the subject, but you sound a sensible person and i’d be very happy to discuss them with you some time, just drop me an email (details on town council website).
There are good technical reasons for the none accrual in the accounts but i agree they do present a slightly distorted picture – the true picture is presented in our budget which is much more intuitive.
Steve, I usually agree with most of the things that you put on here, and I agree that quite possibly Backstreeter puts things on here to provoke/promote debate, after all, if not wanted then why have a comments box on here? One thing I disagree with you on though is that the Vale should have sold Tilsley Park to the developers. We already have “proposed” (For that read “forgone conclusion!!”) plans for an extra 610 houses on land adjacent to Dunmore Rd! This area already gets gridlocked in the mornings, making it almost impossible to get off Dunmore Estate/Boulter Drive/Alexander Close. Not to mention the fact that the A34 is already stretched to breaking point, with the slightest accident potentially causing hours of delays, and cars/people stranded on it for hours at a time.
It has concerned me that Tilsley Park was given away to Abingdon School, partly because it is a resource that although “promised” to still allow the public to use, will I feel, soon be “fully booked” for use by the school, and partly because I am 100% sure that the Vale wouldn’t have had the foresight to install a caveat to say that it cannot be sold off for development, and must be kept as a leisure facility!
Are we going to have a cinema???
YES or NO?
My guess is that by the time all of the wrangling has taken place, the costs have spiralled, (as they inevitably do), and no cinema operator has taken the project on, (and local council has changed hands again), the answer will be a NO. Unfortunately this was an over-ambitious vanity project, (albeit with the good intention of reducing the hemorrhaging running costs, that the Vale had the good sense to walk away from!), which right from the start the cost involved far outweighed the benefit of the finished result, I.e. a cinema that was far too small for the size of the town! Already a small fortune has been outlayed, before even a paintbrush has been wielded! Cut the losses now, before any more taxpayers money is wasted? (If it does plough ahead then it will come down to the taxpayer to fund it if no cinema operator deems it worthwhile).
Guido is right. Money has been splashed around on consultants with abandon and I reckon we’ll end up with a tarted-up lobby, some superficial work on the main hall and some improvement in the catering before the money runs out. I’m hoping the TC will have come to it’s senses re. the project and have too much shame to ask the tax payers for more funds to chuck down this money pit.
Yes
At absolutely NO extra cost to the taxpayer?
That’s the plan
But if you can’t get a friendly cinema operator partner….??? What is Plan B??
Can anyone explain why two parking spaces in the cattle market car park have been redesignated as “Reserved”. For whom are they reserved?
Thanks Steve King for trying to suggest that the council should have sold Tisley Park for housing (in case you cannot guess, I am being sarcastic). Tilsley park is well loved and used by many. It’s not just a sports facility, it’s a nice green space to get out and have a walk, has a great children’s play area, and is used by numerous dog walkers each day. It will be bad enough when the 400+ houses are built the other side of TP. Which as far as I can see is a done deal. Dunmore Road is going to become even more of a nightmare, and will have even more traffic implications for the town centre.