Thursday 18 June 2015

A couple of sketches of Herne Bay and Manston and Stone Hill Park and Manston Airport.

you can draw the clock tower at Herne Bay

try to photograph it or just walk away
well it has potential

my first attempt started out too big.

a streetscape from The Pantry is much easier and more relaxed than drawing the clock tower with the traffic whizzing by


The place at Manston, I guess now even what you call it will get someone’s back up, well the issue, where the owners want to build Stone Hill Park http://www.stonehillpark.co.uk/ and various people including a lot of the local politicians want TDC to use cpo powers to buy the land there to turn it into an airfreight hub and aircraft scrapping facility, has gone into overdrive.

I may ramble on here. 

18 comments:

  1. According to MacKinley the CAA are ready to give back the licence. Does that mean after a gap of over a year the 106 agreements are still valid or will they need PP even assuming the CPO gets done in less than a year? And of course the owners have to roll over without a fight.

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  2. Barry my take is the thing is going bonkers, I would say the main issues for any cpo are where the liability lies if RiverOak pull out or go into administration and the compensation. As far as I can see anyone affected by the cpo, and that would be anyone affected in a different way if the cpo happened or didn’t happen could claim compensation. So the 15k houses in Ramsgate where the value will drop because they are at the end of a freight hub runway, then I guess the owner will be able to claim compensation.

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  3. Michael

    We live in interesting times!

    I can only imagine that the legal profession will be rubbing their hands with glea.

    I also can't help feeling that Sir Roger's asertion that the airport could be back in operation by early 2016 might be a little optimistic...

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  4. Todays announcement is more to do with putting pressure on UKIP. The Tories would like nothing better than watch them screw up. Look at the language "there is no impediment to starting the CPO now"

    Truth is there is still much Law that says you cannot go ahead without respecting the human rights of the owners.
    "6. It should be emphasized that any decision to make a CPO requires proper consideration of a likely interference with the owners’ human rights. Before proceeding to any CPO the Council should seek further information on their plans for the site from the new owners. The Council must be in a position to assess the degree of interference with the landowner’s human rights, and also, if appropriate, to consider the benefits of their alternative proposals for the site to strike the public interest balance"

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  5. Barry

    There is a lot of politics going on here, the tories would love to see the only UKIP council in the country paint itself into an expensive corner, but I'm not entirely sure what Sir Roger's motivation is.

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  6. So MP MacKinley is showing that he has much to learn as a newbie. its now recorded that he thinks the airport could be up and running early next year. He need to do his local homework. I have news for him. A relatively simple CPO like the Dreamland one took 2 and a half years from start to the final high court appeal.
    The earliest Manston could reopen would be at least one year after a CPO was granted had he not noticed that the airport would need to be re-equipt, staffed and checked before it was in a safe state.
    Now we are looking at 2019 even if a CPO was started tomorrow.

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  7. Dave according to Iris the Dreamland CPO has yet to conclude

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  8. It's been an interesting week on the Manston Airport front, both sides seem to feel they are on the road to victory, but I've begun to wonder if Trevor Cartner & Chris Musgrave would actually regard a successful CPO as a defeat...

    My thinking is this; if the CPO doesn't get started or fails at some stage there will be very little to stop C&M from seeing through their plans for Stone Hill Park. If on the other hand the CPO is successful C&M will receive a significant amount of money for the land, and compensation for their costs. I also understand that there is some provision in the CPO legislation that enables the former owner to claim a further sum for increase in land value up to ten years after the CPO.

    It may well be that the current owners will make a substantial amount of money out of the site without ever having to go to all the bother of getting planning permission, building, finding tenants etc. TDC, local residents and businesses will be left with the potential costs, and uncertainty of actually getting the airport up and running and making a success of it.

    RiverOak will presumably create an investment fund as a separate legal entity from their current business and other funds, so unless any personal guarantees are given, the liability will be limited to the amount that any investor puts into the fund.

    As a final thought, if the CPO is successful and an airport with passenger services does come about, I would imagine that having an international airport on the doorstep would be a considerable advantage when trying to attract new firms to relocate to places such as Discovery Park.

    Can anybody see a flaw in my thoughts?



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  9. No major passenger airlines including KLM want to use Manston let alone use it as a base. Maybe half a dozen holiday charters would use it but thats will not justify a CPO in the public's interest.

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  10. Dave

    You're almost certainly right, major airlines haven't been interested in Manston in the past and there would be little change in their business case for coming in the future just because the airport has different operators, but my hypothesis is: Do C&M see an advantage in fighting the CPO, but not hard enough to win? Presumably if they "lost" C&M may even see a benefit in the airport succeeding...

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  11. I agree that Cartner and Musgrave are in a win-win situation. But it all comes down to whether you win big or win small. After the abuse they've suffered that are going to want to win big and, given the strength of their case, they will take this all the way. If Riveroak wanted to pay £100 million for the site, they could have offered this much already. Then there would be no need for a CPO. The only purpose of the CPO is to try to obtain it for them at a knock-down price. When they find out that they will have to pay market value for the site I don't expect to see them for dust.

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  12. Arjun

    It does beg the question, if RiverOak want to run an airport and are good for the money why don't they just get an independent valuation of the site and start negotiating with the owners around that price?

    As you say, we can only assume that they think a CPO will get them a bargain price.

    It seems strange that UKIP, of all parties, seem keen to take the legally held property of a British owned and registered company and hand it over to a foreign company registered in an American state which shelters companies registered there from public scrutiny.

    It also very strange the politicians seem to condone, or at least have failed to condemn, the campaign of abuse aimed at C&M with the stated intention of forcing them to give up their property.

    Wasn't it the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta this week?

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  13. It's clear that the owners have sought some good legal advice. They are now one step ahead of the pro-airport mob, and are drawing clear. The applications for planning permission are a smart move. With the pro-airport campaigners objecting en masse there will be considerable pressure on TDC to reject these applications. But with no defined plan of their own, there are no valid planning grounds for rejecting the applications. Presumably, C&M will go to court, get the rejections overturned and that will be the end of the pro-airport campaign.

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  14. This is one of the problems that you get with a cpo when the acquiring authority is also the planning authority, it puts TDC in a no win situation as if they turn down application it will increase the compensation that TDC will have to pay.

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  15. Michael

    Presumably if TDC were to accrue too great a liability as the result of a failed CPO it may find itself unable to fund an acceptable minimum level of services, it could then be forced into a merger with neighbouring districts, perhaps Dover and Canterbury.

    Not a particularly great legacy for the first, and probably the last, UKIP controlled local authority.

    The irony is that I got the impression that UKIP would have won TDC without even having to mention Manston, it didn't appear as a major concern on any of the opinion polls that I saw.

    I wonder if Chris Wells will come to regret being so gung-ho over the CPO?

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  16. Chris Wells is facing a big problem. Almost all of the remaining UKIP councillors are totally inexperienced and don't understand their responsibilities or the consequences of their actions. Many of them have publicly declared that they will vote to go ahead with a CPO irrespective of what the officers say. Chris Wells knows that it could be catastrophic to do this. In my opinion, he's stalling the process in a desperate attempt to buy time to find a way out. The best bet for an exit strategy is the PWC report. If it doesn't live up to expectations I imagine Chris Wells will use it to blame Gale and the Tories for misrepresenting the prospects of a successful CPO. Whether this will be good enough to head off rebellion from his troops is another question.

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  17. And while the cats away the problems in Ramsgate aren't getting sorted
    1. Pleasuama: what's happening
    2: Cliff face repairs: well?
    3: Westcliff hall repairs: ?
    4: Pavilion: When is work starting?
    5: Marina Car park plans: vanished into a black hole
    6: Town square project: ditto
    7: Port: needs plan B

    Any more?

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  18. There is some Pleasurama info on Michael's earlier post on the 17th June from a comment by gmandaras who manages to get in contact with Cardys and a council officer.

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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.