What council leader Mike Goodman said on 17th October 2013

Weymouth and Portland management committee chairman Councillor Mike Goodman told the View:

“The council is always open to ideas, particularly if they are fully funded and costed schemes.

I have had no prior knowledge of this proposal, but I would encourage those involved to come forward with a detailed, properly costed proposal for the council to consider.”

We started talking to the council about this a couple of years ago and went through all the official channels. The developer, Pete Halsall, has visited Weymouth twice now to look at the peninsula site.

The last time was on 8th January this year (2013) when he and I met with council officers. Then we submitted the Outline Approach including what it would cost to implement (£7,000) to a senior brief-holding councillor who then sent it to the director with overall responsibility for the peninsula. We did everything we could have done and were asked to do.

There was no reply for two months and then we got a 12 line email on 28th May 2013 from a director inviting us to join the discussions for the Local Plan in the the autumn with no specific date or time to interact. No mention was given to our ideas, plans or costs in the council's email.

The subject line of the council's email of 28th May has been carried over from the one we sent with the proposal, it reads,

"Pavilion peninsula multi-million pound investment and development"

More importantly, the BID, Save the Pavilion, The Friends of the Pavilion, Councillor Nowak, Councillor Byatt and Councillor Brember have all read the same proposal that was sent to the appropriate people at the council and they all think the charrette should be implemented as soon as possible.