Tesco / ASDA !!!

[wheels]

Correct Belly

[Belly]

Really? Im not sure I would describe it as 'sly and deceitful', I suspect more that it was 'reactive and unprepared'.

The 'facts' as far as I am aware, is that someone at the College leaked to locals that the CAMSFC was looking to sell off the Hibbert Lane site to fund future improvements. This was before the site had been 'marketed' to developers. All hell then broke loose, with the College being accused of all sorts and MIA being formed and proceding to berate the College (and Council) for being secretive and refusing to make public their detailed plans. My guess is that at this stage CAMSFC didn't have any plans for Hibbert Lane, other than to sell it for the best price they could.

The bids came in and Asda won (after six months of anti-Tesco ranting!). This then became public knowledge but still no plans, as ASDA had simply won a financial bid process and didn't have any public plans to show.

Planning and design for the site took place (including necessary and quite proper surveys of baseline conditions), this almost certainly involved initial discussions with the Council in order to get a feel for what the Council considered were the key issues and the best way of satisfactorily resolving these matters. The Plans were then finalised in draft and the scheme presented to the public.

Thats about standard for any evolving development scheme and I don't see any real deceitfulness in this.

The reason that people seem to have got the feeling that the College has been secretive is that for the first 9 months or so of this process CAMSFC were being bombarded with demands for information, when in reality they had virtually no information to give out. Once the personal slurs started, unsurprisingly, the hatches were then firmly battended down. I still think its amazing that one of the key opposition attack points seems to be to berate the College governors for not being local. Its all a bit Roystin Vasey at times for my liking.

Overall, to put it another way. If the deals had been done privately (and unknown to the public at large) and the first thing that we found out was the presentation of proposals at public consultation (i.e. within the last couple of weeks), would that have been so bad? Would it have been sly and deceitful? And what overall difference would it have made anyway? It certainly would have assisted the fight against global warming, given the amount of hot air that has been vented over the past 18 months, just for us to arrive at a place we would have been at anyway.  

[simonesaffron]

Sorry to contradict Miss M but I thought the £9M bid was considered but the college declined it in favour of higher bids from Tesco & ASDA, with the college eventually plumping for the highest bid from Walmart, which we now know was for £13M.
The Waitrose/housing bid would in all probability been accepted by the council. So the college has mortgaged the whole future of Marple for £4M, a sum that the council would probably have loaned to the college at very attractive rates. Instead we have the prospect of a decimated High St., empty petrol forecourts, traffic chaos at the Stockport Road/Hibbert Lane junction & in side roads, blighted property in the vicinity of the new Walmart, all for £4M. Was it worth it CAMSFC!
+ the building on the college could probably have been started by now.

I would have thought as a public corporation the governors have a duty to go with the highest bidder and could be criticised if they didn't

I'm not defending CAMSFC in fact I think their interaction with the community in this has been sly and deceitful and I wouldn't believe anything that Ms Cassidy says even now. However £4m is still a very large sum of money to borrow and repay especially when there is an alternative.

[Dave]

Wheels writes 'I  would have thought as a public corporation the governors have a duty to go with the highest bidder and could be criticised if they didn't'.

That is the case, and it would not just be a case of being 'criticised' - the college is simply not allowed to dispose of any assets for less than the best available price. It's as simple as that.

Miss M confirms what we would have guessed: that 'plan B' is simply to sell the land for less, and scale back their Buxton Lane plans accordingly. 

[wheels]

Sorry to contradict Miss M but I thought the £9M bid was considered but the college declined it in favour of higher bids from Tesco & ASDA, with the college eventually plumping for the highest bid from Walmart, which we now know was for £13M.
The Waitrose/housing bid would in all probability been accepted by the council. So the college has mortgaged the whole future of Marple for £4M, a sum that the council would probably have loaned to the college at very attractive rates. Instead we have the prospect of a decimated High St., empty petrol forecourts, traffic chaos at the Stockport Road/Hibbert Lane junction & in side roads, blighted property in the vicinity of the new Walmart, all for £4M. Was it worth it CAMSFC!
+ the building on the college could probably have been started by now.

I would have thought as a public corporation the governors have a duty to go with the highest bidder and could be criticised if they didn't

[wheels]

What do you mean the date time and place of the consultation was in the public domain for at least 3 weeks. Whilst the college and ASDA have scored many own goals over the year this was not one of them unless of course you feel we should have all had a personal hand delivered letter plus an email and phone call perhaps asking us ever so nicely if we would like to come to a consultation.

There can be very few people in Marple who were not aware of the event and they would mostly have been under 5.

How was it in the public domain for 3 weeks ? It was on this website and it appeared in the CAMSFC website
is that classed as being in the public domain. The leaflets were not delivered to every household in the vicinity of the college. The information as been available for 3 weeks if you happen to come across it. That is slightly different then everybody being made aware of it.
Hopefully when the actual planning application goes through it will be different.

I think you would have had to have been willful not to be aware the consultation was taking place. The fact that so many turned up indicates to me that the developers got that part of it right to suggest anything else is clutching at straws.

[Victor M]

Sorry to contradict Miss M but I thought the £9M bid was considered but the college declined it in favour of higher bids from Tesco & ASDA, with the college eventually plumping for the highest bid from Walmart, which we now know was for £13M.
The Waitrose/housing bid would in all probability been accepted by the council. So the college has mortgaged the whole future of Marple for £4M, a sum that the council would probably have loaned to the college at very attractive rates. Instead we have the prospect of a decimated High St., empty petrol forecourts, traffic chaos at the Stockport Road/Hibbert Lane junction & in side roads, blighted property in the vicinity of the new Walmart, all for £4M. Was it worth it CAMSFC!
+ the building on the college could probably have been started by now.

[Miss Marple]

Ms Cassidy stated that plan B was housing, she stated that she did not ever think that SMBC would have refused planning permission  .    Sorry for having to continually repeat myself but some posters on this site never want to know the events as to how we have got to this stage.   MIA were contacted by a developer who stated that they had offered nearly 9million for housing and a very small Waitrose, but their bid had never been even considered by CAMSFC.   
MIA had to inform the developer that we could not assist in anyway as that part of things  were nothing to do with MIA as we had only formed to prevent a supermarket on Hibbert Lane.
Now I am giving information which is the truth so I do not expect to have derogatory replies.  It's a shame that because of a few posters on this site more information can not be shared.   But I know i will get negative response from some on this site but hey it's brightens up their day 

[simonesaffron]

I do understand your take on this wheels but in my opinion there would have been many people who would have been totally against a supermarket on Hibbert Lane if that had been the sole issue. In fact there were many who thought it was. I myself had not really considered the College's plans to develop Buxton Lane because I was unaware of exactly what they were. However the two schemes have now been linked
inexorably together (which is very clever of ASDA/CAMSFC)  and one which I think will pose a conundrum for the Council.   

So it very much becomes about Education with the issue of a supermarket being secondary to having a spanking new college for our kids. So Education the becomes the wider issue for many when last month the issue for many was just ...shall we have an ASDA in town or not?
 

[jethroh65]

What do you mean the date time and place of the consultation was in the public domain for at least 3 weeks. Whilst the college and ASDA have scored many own goals over the year this was not one of them unless of course you feel we should have all had a personal hand delivered letter plus an email and phone call perhaps asking us ever so nicely if we would like to come to a consultation.

There can be very few people in Marple who were not aware of the event and they would mostly have been under 5.

How was it in the public domain for 3 weeks ? It was on this website and it appeared in the CAMSFC website
is that classed as being in the public domain. The leaflets were not delivered to every household in the vicinity of the college. The information as been available for 3 weeks if you happen to come across it. That is slightly different then everybody being made aware of it.
Hopefully when the actual planning application goes through it will be different.

[wheels]

What do you mean the date time and place of the consultation was in the public domain for at least 3 weeks. Whilst the college and ASDA have scored many own goals over the year this was not one of them unless of course you feel we should have all had a personal hand delivered letter plus an email and phone call perhaps asking us ever so nicely if we would like to come to a consultation.

There can be very few people in Marple who were not aware of the event and they would mostly have been under 5.

[Victor M]

Surely everyone with any interest in this matter would have registered that interest with the college in which case they would have received notification by 29th June.

How did anyone know they had to "register with the college". I had written to them a number of times but as I didn't receive any notification obviously I hadn't registered and 1 weeks notice is not long enough. Their plan was to limit the number of people who could attend.

[wheels]

No I think that is just as narrow as those who want cheap beans and petrol. For me it is much more about the identity of the town/suburb than about narrow issues like education and beans.

Wheels,

Education is not a narrow issue, it is about as wide as it gets.

Disagree entirely Simone for the purpose of this discussion its a very very narrow issues no more or less so than the price of a tin of beans. The whole debate is much much wider than either of those two issues.

[alstan]

I was very surprised at the turnout yesterday. I was at the college at 1.30, after the arrival of the march, and there were no more than people there. I thought there would be far more.
Also I don't understand all these complaints about lack of notification. Surely everyone with any interest in this matter would have registered that interest with the college in which case they would have received notification by 29th June.

[Dave]

Sgk writes 't's a wonder Cambridge or Oxford manage to crank out any decent results with all their old buildings,' but it's a bit rididulous to compare a sixth form college operating out of a converted school with a fabulously wealthy oxbridge college in its historic and grade 1 listed purpose built buildings. Oxbridge colleges are among the richest organisations in the land. They have massive endowments provided by centuries of aristocratic and wealthy alumni. They have cellars full of port. Liveried flunkies wait upon their dons and undergraduates. They don't have to worry about running costs! And when they need new facilities, they don't have to fund it by selling off their existing buildings - they just flog off a few thousand acres of farmland, top it up with a couple of million from a wealthy alumnus, and name the building after him.

As for plan B, I'm not aware that there is one. What is it?