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I've not been on the Forum much lately so apologies if the following has already been said; I haven't read anywhere else that this exercise is going on (I don't walk around with my ears and eyes closed), so perhaps a bit more/better publicity about it would be in order.
A good number (most ?) of people would like more localism, where decisions are made at the lowest level and Town Councils are the lowest elected level we have.
Toilets and tourism are two inter-linked services - both benefit a lot of people, but neither are strategic responsibilities; both very worthwhile, but are they necessary for the Town to be successful ? many visitors to the Town visit the public toilets and they probably create a false impression of Dover as they are ones not to be proud of.
The Town Council must act in a way that benefits the Town, its residents, businesses and of course, visitors and not the party they belong to or what they perceive as to be in their party's interests, even if that is a long-term advantage.
Back at the early part of this year when at Dover Business Support, I started asking businesses whether they would be happy (in principle) to allow the public to use their facilities, if a sum of money came forward to pay them for this service.
All those I asked, said yes; I couldn't complete the exercise as I was sacked in March, but I do think that this was something that the subsequent DBS Manager could have done and his succesor could do too.
There would be a need for public toilets, but maybe not so many.
This argument came up many times earlier in the year, on here and in discusions outside of the Forum; I said then and Paul W has recently confirmed on here, that if the DTC took over the toilets, people would not be charged twice and so avoid double rating.
DTC were going to take over tourism early last year and talks with DDC and the Chamber of Commerce were active. Two locations were visited and discussed and decided upon, but sadly, because of the time taken (for whatever reasons) both premises were lost.
Suitable large (ish) premises in or around the Market Square are essential for an increasingly successful tourism unit; stagnation will only cause it to wither and die and we cannot afford to have tourism do that, we need a bouyant tourism centre - for everyones's sake. We need a pro-active tourism body too.
Roger