Friday 28 December 2007

Will Thanet District Council be wasting £450.000 of your money?


Here in Ramsgate talking to people in the shop there is a lot of concern over the Pleasurama development. The only information I can offer is that work is due to start on the cliff façade repairs on the 7th of January and that the experts I have consulted say this will probably take about a year to complete after which it will be safe to start on the building work below and the environment agency have finally received the approved plans.

The main thing that concerns me is that cash strapped TDC have put aside £450,000 for this and are going to go ahead with the work before finalised plans for the building have appeared.

Certainly they can’t build using the approved plans as they are full of errors, apart from peoples heads and vehicles being embedded in the ceiling, where an attempt has been made to fit a 5 story building in a space only big enough for a 4 story one the architect seems to have been dimensionally challenged.

The experts I have discussed developing the Pleasurama site with generally are of the opinion that the only large development that would work on the site is one integrated with the cliff, where the cliff top is extended over the building and slightly beyond so that anything thrown of the cliff won’t hit the building of the cars parked in its car park.
Taking this into account it probably means that that the £450.000 will be wasted as the cliff façade would be rebuilt differently were it part of a building.

2 comments:

  1. I deeply suspect that this has much to do with the all-too-common practice of the "must spend budget". These budgets are slashed if the assigned money s not spent in the given time period with a few future planning successes. I live in an area that sees the surface of the road dug up in the the run up to April and then put back again (no actual work is done but everyone looks busy

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  2. Matt I think you will find once you have looked at the engineers report on the condition of the cliff at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tdc/report.htm and http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tdc/id39.htm you may agree that the work needs doing urgently, what worries me is that the work should be integrated into the whole project.

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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.