Sleep-starved Mid Argyll Pool Board submits Business Plan to Council

The heroic new Board of the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool has now submitted a 3 Year Business Plan and Cash Flow Projections to Argyll and Bute Council.

Stephen Whiston Chair of the Board says: ‘The cash flow projections we have developed put some considerable challenge on the business to develop its income streams, by:

• increasing user numbers
• accessing grant funding
• implementing cost efficiency savings.

‘These projections also include an increase in the SLA allocation from 2011/12 onwards. (Editor: ‘SLA’ means ‘Service Level Agreement’ – the imposed bureaucrat-speak. Just think ‘grant’.)

‘This proposed increase is based on the potential conclusions of the Council’s coming Best Value Review of swimming pools in Argyll; and on recent commitments to explore and access Community Planning Partnership (CPP) resources.

The Board believes that it is via these avenues that the true operating costs of the facility – the pool has a £30,000 core funding deficit – can be addressed’.

Argyll and Bute Council has offered to bring forward the SLA (grant) payment allocated for 2010/11 to 2009/10. This has been factored into the Pool Board’s projections.

Stephen Whiston says: ‘The MACEL Board (Mid Argyll Community Enterprise Ltd), would therefore like formally to record its appreciation of this offer and request that this payment is made in February 2010.

‘This injection gives the pool more time to implement its plans and keep the pool open’.

This Board replaced the previous Board which, in every sense, gave way in March 2009 with the affairs of the facility in chaos.

The new Board, all volunteers and many from the Mid Argyll Triathlon Club who are constant users of the pool, have literally got down and dirty in the work they’ve had to do. As well as everything else, circumstances have dictated that they actually run the pool on a day-to-day basis.

There is a joke amongst Board members that Chair, Stephen Whiston, is so stressed he cannot sleep afer 4.00am and starts emailing at that time – while fellow Board member, Ali MacLeod, can’t get to sleep and emails until 3.00am when exhaustion finally knocks him out.

It may be a joke but it’s also true. We get emailed updates and Press Releases which follow that time pattern with monotonous regularity. (The fact that we’re usually there to open them as they come in is another matter.)

It’s worth recording that the members of the new Board, in the work they’re doing to save the Mid Argyll Pool for the area it serves, are also progressively turning Lochgilphead into something it has struggled to become – a cohesive community.

The solidarity of community support for the facility it initially raised funds to build – and paid to rescue from imminent closure under a year ago, is now allied to the energetic efforts of the new Board to demonstrate and mobilise it.

This looks like being the silver lining in a cloud that need not have darkened the skies over Mid Argyll.