Monday 2 August 2010

Questions for the district auditor and a new restaurant in Ramsgate

Pictures at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop810a/id4.htm here are some thoughts on them.

Vista is looking, well pink, I hope it works better than the computer operating system of that name did for me.

It still smells of drains a lot of the time in Harbour Parade and I have reservations that capping off the contaminated surface drain down there without further investigation is a good idea. I have made an official complaint about this one and have been assured that it is being investigated, this is not necessarily an aggressive approach towards the council as often without an official complaint they can’t justify dealing with something.

There is certainly more muck and rubbish in the inner basin than one would like, but I am uncertain what if any of it is leaking from the old pipes under Harbour Parade.

The council seem to have upped the anti on stopping people from diving off the fish Quay, a gate and fencing like something normally associated with concentration camps has now appeared near our one and only beach hut.

I wonder what they would do if an ordinary member of the public erected something like this on a listed structure.

The problem for me though is that the people who dived there will only go and dive elsewhere and probably somewhere further away from help if something goes wrong.

What the council should be doing is using the money to provide a proper diving station like the one we lost and caused people to dive there.

No 3 slipway looks to be getting ready for another vessel, interesting as these listed slipways were built during World War Two to repair costal defence craft, it is all very time warp that appeals to the historian in me.

Quite a bit of my spare time recently has been spent looking at the council’s performance and forming valid questions for the district auditor as this has to be completed this week because of the time window allowed to do it in.

Here are an example of some of the questions I have asked about Pleasurama that the district auditor has confirmed are valid, as they may help others in framing their questions:


- how much money did the Council spend on the Pleasurama development in 2009/10?

- how much of this money related to repairs to the cliff facade?

- how much compensation has the Council claimed re repairs to the cliff facade in 2009/10?

- how much compensation has the Council received re the cliff facade in 2009/10?

- how much compensation did it expect to receive, as at the end of 2009/10?

- what does the Council estimate its potential liability to be in respect of the Pleasurama development, in respect of not determining the development agreement?

- what does the Council estimate its potential liability to be re the risk of a tidal surge storm or cliff collapse results in injury or loss of life?


Of course if you are perfectly happy about the councils performance and accounts you won’t need to ask any questions, so this won’t apply to you.

2 comments:

  1. "I wonder what they would do if an ordinary member of the public erected something like this on a listed structure" - I wonder indeed. Would we get planning consent? This is a real disaster which regrettably reflects the mentality of our Lords and Masters.

    The way this "problem" has been approached in no way reflects any concern for public safety, merely to cover arses in the event of an incident. A pathetic and very amateurish approach designed to protect careers rather than people.

    And we've paid for it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. As the hut has been there for more than 4 weeks don't they have to get planning permission, they should probably be paying business rates on it as well.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.