Last week there was a rumble about the supposed “priceless” ceiling of the Tower Ballroom which apparently is under threat from water damage from the “hydrodemolition” work being done on the Tower by Cumbrian civil engineers MP Marine.
The work to sort it out amounts to £625,000 and without any scrutiny, debate or tendering process Alan Cavill in conjunction with Maxine Callow have awarded this contract to MP Marine “on the grounds of urgency and the mitigation of the Councils exposure to risk.” Presumably they just named their price.
So who’s paying for it? It has been suggested that this will be current tenants Leisure Parcs. It even says that this is the case in the Council’s decision document. This seems utterly absurd given that they’re being kicked out by Merlin Entertainments in a few months. And that’s when you realise that of course Leisure Parcs are not directly funding it at all: we are.
Any tenant of any council owned business unit would be paying the council a rent and Leisure Parcs are the same. But to suggest that they are directly paying for the Tower Ballroom ceiling to be fixed is nothing but fiction. It’s no different to saying that all the other smaller businesses in Blackpool are paying for it because they also pay a rent to the council. No. The council are paying for it in the same way it pays for Peter Callow’s rail travel to go to meetings in London.
The noose around our necks is tightening as the council’s empire building swallows an ever expanding load of spending bukkake.
So, the following questions arise. Should the council be awarding contracts to its preferred developers without any tendering process? Should the council be putting the story out that Leisure Parcs are paying for it when they are not? And finally, should the council have acquired these businesses at all given that it is a council and not a tourism business?
Scrutiny!!!! haha
One year from now, Blackpool’s regeneration will have floundered and the town will be in a major depression.
Nothing like a bit of support, eh?
I do agree that the regeneration at the moment only seems to have benefits in the short term though.
Its not about support mate, just my gut feeling (I hope I am wrong) as to the economic state of things in a years time, call it a double dip.My fear is that whilst cuts are needed,they may go too far and impair growth.Blackpool has been heavily dependant on public money,it desperately needs private investment, more than ever.But public spending and private investment are not mutually exclusive of one another, as we shall see.Also Blackpool is dependant on public sector jobs,if the 22nd of June heralds massive cuts in them;then Blackpool is well fucked.
Yes there should be scrutiny but if the roof was in immediate danger I support the council for getting on with the job.
I believe the council in the 1920′s paid for the Tower steel to be replaced and thank god they had such forsite otherwise we would have been nothing more than New Brighton a resort that lost it’s tower or worse still Morecombe a former resort that lost everything.
I agree with Zim that I’d support the council paying for the roof anyway (not that it’s my taxes, but if they were…). The resort needs to keep the few iconic items it has – the Tower, the Winter Gardens and probably the Pleasure Beach if only because there’s going to be nothing in the pipeline for such major icons for the foreseeable future (the Chillfactor type thing on the Central Station car park seems to be very quiet and isn’t unique anyway).
What I don’t agree with though is trying to hide the economic reality of what taxpayers are stumping up for – if money should be spent on these things then the council and its leaders should have the guts to put that to the electorate, not try to hide things for example stating that the cost would come out of rents paid by Leisure Parks – that’s forgoing on rents they would have got from Leisure Parks effectively paying it themselves but won’t seem like that to some people less use to financial things. And when you’ve paid a lot for something you want to start seeing a return straight away – not delaying when you’ll get money coming in from what you’ve paid out for.
And if Phil is right in this work being necessary as a result of hydrodemolition work being carried out, do those contractors not have a responsibility to pay for the work – or is an insurance claim possible? When other people’s money is being used sometimes those in charge pay up themselves far too readily and this should be confirmed to be impossible to get the work funded otherwise.