Ferret finds this a hard post to write and unfortunately it will not make easy reading.
At this meeting the income figures for the last 3 months for the Waterpark (the Lakeside café bar) were revealed as:
October £17,000
November £15,000
December £9,000
This amount hardly covers the cost of food and drink that has been purchased, let alone the major costs of staff wages.
Also the energy bills must be enormous, for us anyway but not for the sitting tenant.
Even worse it was announced that the heating system is in need of major overhaul that is estimated to cost £108,000!
All the pedalos are in need of replacement, at a cost that at present is unknown; the beach is in need of important health and safety work also.
What was Jean Eccles response to these appalling figures?
You’ve guessed it, diversion, no answers or solutions were offered, she wanted to know why the figures for Sandygate or the community centre weren’t available, obviously to turn attention away from the issue.
It’s probably as well they weren’t, as they will be just as bad having been under the mismanagement of Jean, Kenyon and cabal colleagues for nearly 4 years now.
Ferret ran a post a short while ago, that predicted a loss of up to half a million pounds for the Lakeside café/bar, which was the brain child of the disgraced liar and bankrupt former Chair – Jim Kenyon.
An amount that was based on figures released by Alan Draper, an amount which must now be even higher.
All the misspending that has occurred under the cabal tenure is now coming to light.
According to Kenyon, Eccles, Womersley and the rest of the cabal, the Lakeside Café bar was going to be the answer to all of our dreams! It would make that much profit it would fund everything else and to top it all off, we were even going to get a £200000 precept reduction!
Yet here we are, assets requiring massive amount of repair because of lack of planned maintenance and regular budgeted for repair work.
The plundered reserves are gone, the cupboards are bare.
It is the time of year that the budgets for 2023/24 should be being prepared; to do all the necessary work would mean a massive increase in the precept, unless of course there was an alternative plan.
Ferret wonders just what could that be?
Possibly sell some land? Or perhaps does anybody want a Waterpark?
The huge losses predicted are now a certainty, Ferret wonders if it was a coincidence that the live stream zoom feed went down at the start of public question time…
The public are definitely being stopped from hearing and seeing the true diabolical financial mess the Independant HTC have put our community in.They also know that denying the public our rights to challenge their ludicrous spending will they think stop parishioners challenging them at meetings ,sending in emails,FOIs but how wrong they are.The publics blinkers are well and truly off and will continue to ask questions and continue to challenge what is going off.Why is it at meetings and especially at public question time suddenly the gremlins go to work and at the vital financial relevations the oooooops the live zoom goes down oooooops the public watching at home must not hear public challenging questions the STOP button is pressed or in the case of the meeting on 19/12/22 the meeting that never started due to the disruptive behaviour of a staged pantomime the START button was not pressed to obtain evidence and the questions of why need to be put to the Town Clerk Alan Draper.Time now for all the good councillors to start and challenge and question why this keeps happening perhaps an obvious solution would be to hold the meetings down stairs where the internet connection works but could there be a reason why they prefer to make internet connections down excuses denying the public hearing and seeing.Time is ticking when the community will have our chance to bring in the changes and we use our VOTES wisely.
I’ve thought for a long time now that the internet connection dropping out has been a little too convenient.