BIDS for Oban Forward on 4th November

Tomorrow – 4th November – local tourism group, Oban Forward is hosting a meeting to explore the Business Improvement District (BIDS) initiative, addressed by Ian Davidson Porter who is Project Director for BIDS.

The meeting is at 7.00pm on Wednesday 4th November at the Argyllshire Gathering Halls in Oban.

BIDS is being supported by the Scottish Government and has been set up to help develop the management of the assets of villages towns and cities across Scotland.

The BIDS website has an irritating front page with text which is far from lucid or appealing.It’s not only that you can’t make mush sense of it. You can’t be bothered.

However, if you go to the About BIDS page you get a better idea about what it is. This is how it describes itself:

‘A Business Improvement District (BID) is a precisely-defined geographical area of a town, city, or commercial district, where businesses have voted to invest collectively in local improvements in addition to those delivered by statutory authorities.  They are often, although not exclusively, a partnership arrangement through which the local business community and the statutory authorities can take forward projects which will benefit the local economy’.

This would seem to be a specifically focused variation on the Development Trust with which many Argyll communities are already familiar.

The ethos of self=help which seems to be at the heart of it, with encouragement to businesses to invest collectively and collaboratively in their area is the sort of energetic spirit that can make a real contribution to Scotland.