Dave,
You and I have this convo before, I totally agree with you that Steve Hunt was/is not the best person to own the pier because of his financial situation BUT...CCBC were in a position where they could have leased the pier from him at a peppercorn rent, they could have then sub-leased it to Shore Thing. It would have been up to them to source funding, with CCBC’s help, the bid for lottery funding was flawed and I pointed this out at the time, but the real question here is; why did CCBC buy the pier before they knew the result of the bid?
What they have done is saddle us, the tax payer, with an, as yet, unknown bill. The pier has to be made safe and maintained, the cost of which will be in the 10’s of thousands, by taking responsibility for it they have committed us to its upkeep and all because the leader of the council refused to discuss the matter and walked out of the meeting.
There is, of course, opportunity to re-submit the bid but that will take time, until then the safety and upkeep of the pier is at our cost, again I say, needlessly. Schedule 12a (public and press exempt) was used throughout the meetings held about the pier so we will never know the full truth or if, even, the full council were ever made aware of the three different lease options that were put on the table at the David Jones meeting.
The entire handling of this has been scandalous from day one and, as far as I can see, there are questions that need to be answered and those answers need to come from the very top of the CCBC tree.