Tuesday 14 May 2013

The Royal Sands Development on the Pleasurama site in Ramsgate, TDCIT filming meetings, in fact the council’s website leads me a right old dance.


The draft minutes to the council meeting of Thursday 18th April, with the written questions and answers relating to Pleasurama have appeared on the council’s website at http://tdc-mg-dmz.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=141&MId=2701&Ver=4

They may have been there for some time but what with the local elections so on I hadn’t really looked.

Anyway as the relevant part of the meeting was also recently webcast I thought I would go through the questions and answers with the video.

I know the recent election results suggest that there is little public interest in the videos of council meeting, probably little public interest in our local councils, town, district or county. The message from the voters seemed to be, “no mater who our councillors are, we expect pretty much the civil servants running the show and paying little attention to the public or their representatives” so we may as well sent a message to central government.  

But frankly the current situation with this video is ridiculous, I went to the council’s website homepage and there is the link to the wrong video, i.e the video of the previous meeting on 7th February. To be quite honest if I hadn’t put up the information that the video had been published on the press release blog http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/thanet-district-council-meeting-webcast.html I doubt I would have been able to find it, even knowing it was there.   

How the council can justify the expense of publishing the video and then putting it where it can’t be found is beyond me.

Sorry about all that, paying out taxes and getting something broken in return is pretty annoying, I guess I will take this one up with the council, is it a mistake or a deliberate attempt to make the webcast impossible to find, so no one watches it and the council can then justify stopping webcasting meetings.

Anyway I have read through all of the stuff that they have put up in an effort to answer public concerns about the development and am not really much the wiser.

Personally I am holding back on The Royal Sands Issue until the council’s deadline of the 22nd of this month, which is next week.


Update Cllr Ian Driver is his position of chair of overview and scrutiny called in one of the issues Related to The Royal Sands, doing business with offshore companies and a partly related issue about filming at council meetings.


He then failed to turn up at the scrutiny meeting, so I guess after his standing down as chair at the last scrutiny meeting, for the duration of that meeting only, there is a question over his remaining chair of scrutiny.  

Here is the link to the details of the meeting, some of the links on this council webpage don’t work http://tdc-mg-dmz.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=119&MId=3402&Ver=4  

12 comments:

  1. On the 15th April 2013 TDC officers met with Shaun Keegan and Mike Rider to discuss the site (No Cardy nor Terry Painter at the meeting) as reported by the Thanet Gazette. As I understand it Mike Rider was the same guy that advised our jailed Council Leader. A bit odd this!!

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  2. Why, legal advisers work for all kinds of people. Some they win some they lose so nothing odd there unless you are looking for conspiracy theories.

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    1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    2. Barry I have deleted your comment as I believe it is potentially libellous.

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    3. could have been expressed differently maybe. Sentiment was right tho

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    4. James is VERY fond of making allegations he can't back with a shred of evidence Will, i wouldn;t take him to seriously, few do.

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  3. I gather tiny Terry is now looking to wrest the Pavilion from the possible hands of JD Wetherspoon, and is going around pleading with various Ramsgate organisations to help him front a bid to turn it into some kind of community space. What with Ramsgate Boulevard and the Pleasurama eyesore, that would allow him to stitch up practically the whole of Ramsgate seafront west of the slipway. The result would almost certainly be another decade or two of dereliction, with the front looking more and more run down, as, from his previous track record, he seems to have very little luck in bringing these plans to fruitation.

    I guess his friend Frank has put him up to it, as gawd forbid he should have to face competition. Fortunately everyone he has approached so far has told him where to stick it.

    Personally I have no problem with Wetherspoons running the Pav. At least they are a commercial enterprise who would presumably do up the interior and run it as a going concern. If big-hearted Tel really does want a community space so much, why doesn't he do up the Motor Museum?

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    1. Funny really that a couple of years or so back he opened a prestigious estate agency office smack overlooking the harbour, primarily to handle his Pleasurama development as well as sell other Ramsgate property, then closed it again a few months later when it failed miserably. Obviously he ain't that smart.

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    2. Wetherspoons would be a PERFECT company to take on the pavillion Anon, I would sincerely support any scheme along those lines!

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  4. I think things are getting a bit silly here, developing conspiracy theories around lawyers giving legal advice and estate agents negotiating empty properties is a bit like complaining that the local butcher isn’t a vegetarian.

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    1. Well said Michael! Seems "FORS" really has decended to unsubstanciated rumours, highly dubious stretchs into flights of non sensicle fancy and allegations, without benefit of proof or evidence. I predicted that outcome, sadly they chose to not take heed of my warnings, and allowed the fairy tale authors to hold sway. Shame.

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    2. John Hamilton,

      I left the FORS group on Face book. There are a couple of assiduous FORS members that are digging for information and arranging serious meetings with TDC. Against this and in the main the rest appear to be on the lunatic fringe of the Red Hall Massive. I wish the genuine FORS members every success. But I advise them to get off Facebook which has a habit of attracting the superficial and the self serving.

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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.