Dunoon seen to obstruct progress in Council regeneration funding initiative for Argyll’s main towns

One of Argyll’s five main towns – Campbeltown, Dunoon, Helensburgh, Oban and Rothesay – will eventually be awarded the major part of Argyll and Bute Council’s funding for town centre and waterfront regeneration. As part of the decision-making process, each of these towns was asked, with the help of a firm of consultants (Cogent), to prepare an outline business case (OBC). These were to have been submitted in May 2008.

The Board of the Dunoon project however, was unhappy with aspects of the outline business plan being developed for it, refused to sign it off and employed an additional firm of consultants. Without describing the complicated and lucrative food chain by which consultants consult each other at pub;ic expense, the outcome is that the other towns feel that Dunoon has hijacked special treatment and that there is no longer a level playing field in what is effectively a contest in which the winner takes all.

Whilt to date only Helensbsurgh has signed off its outline business case, changes to Dunoon’s plans ma have a knock-on impact on the cases for the other towns.

Councillors and council staff are annoyed at the way in which the process has bee slowed if not derailed, although Council Leader Dick Walsh, himself a Councillor for Dunoon, points out that the quality of each submission should take precedence over timescales.

BY a majority, the Council has agreed a final submission deadline of 31st October, after which the scoring process will be carried out by an independent firm of consultants. The Council then hope to reach a decision on the funding at a meeting on 27th November.

Nigel Stewart, the Councils Director of Corporate Services, rejected a call from Helensburgh Councillor, Vivien Dance, for the final scored results to be kept in sealed envelopes to be opened at an executive meeting. Mr Stewart said that the process was not one of tendering; that it is being dealt with by officers in an honest and transparent way; and that the scoring results will have to be seen first by the Councils strategic management team.

This raisies two issues:

• while the process may not formally be one of tendering, in reality it amounts to something very like that
• the case for the alleged requirement for the scores first to be see by the Council’s strategic management team has not been publicly made

Given that each of the five towns is all but fighting for survival, feelings are understandably intense. The way the situation has developed  almost guarantees resentments and bad blood after the event.