Reply to comments by Chris - can't we have it all?

"Chris" has asked the following question in his/her comment on the Town Hall meeting of 1 November 2006:

""Could we not have both in the regenration area ie. some housing (preferrably affordable to the locals) and some a tourist/community hub? Could it not be made a condition of the housing development, that the developers provide the tourist/community facilities - or perhaps a partnership between the developers and someone else? What do people think?"

Well, that is EXACTLY what the Development Brief (prepared by EDDC) for this area says should happen and what we all expected to happen. Follow the link on the right to "Development Brief" and have a look at page 22. On this page is a coloured schematic diagram which shows the area being used for shops, mixed use units, tourism, leisure and community AND homes - everything you want. This is what the developers are supposed to build.

Then go to the East Devon Local Plan (also linked on the right). Click on the link for Chapter 13 and then go to page 25-29 (which is real pages 215-219 in the current published plan). Here it has a lot of fine words about the Regeneration area - how important tourism is, how it must have community and leisure facilities, how we must ensure that the holiday camp is kept as a tourist area, etc.

So what went wrong? Well, look at the last page of the Regeneration Brief and there you will see a paragraph that says (I paraphrase): "However, if this all looks too expensive, we will just do whatever we want and this Development Brief won't be worth the paper its's written on". Honestly, that is what it means.

So, the developer tells us it is too expensive to do what the Development Brief says because it is going to cost so much to raise the land and move the tramway (to ensure that the supermarket and DIY store go on his land) that there isn't enough money for anything else. And East Devon District Council officers seem to agree with this. Bearing in mind, the developer knew when he put his plans in that the area had to be raised - it wasn't news to him or to East Devon.

Now what do people think?