The post you are reporting:
55,000 addressed envelopes posted 2nd class post amounts to in excess of £17,000. This money is members money, not mine, not the board's. Effectively, if you have bought a membership share, it is your money. Until we are successful, we have limited resources and must make effective use of what we have and be accountable for how we spend our members money.
Post #237 - in a medium size village such as Eythorne it takes 6 volunteers 5 hours to deliver to every single house and that is when those volunteers do not have to travel from outside. When I covered Coombe valley and St Radigans with 5 volunteers it took us 4 hours to deliver to every house in that area. We were looking at a delivery to every house in the district within a limited time frame and our calculation was that we would need a couple of hundred volunteers putting in complete days in order to make the full drop and volunteers have a limited amount of time to give, especially as most volunteers already give significant portions of their time to other causes. We looked at resources, effective expenditure and timescale and the best value for money to ensure that all 55,000 were delivered within 10 days of the start of the campaign. We also wanted to ensure that it could be immediately seen that this was the DPPT application form.... a plain brown envelope (unaddressed) posted to the house by a volunteer would, I'm afraid, be far more likely to find its way to the bin unopened.
This campaign is a general and first call for everyone across the district to purchase a membership share, resources have been targeted at it accordingly. If we were doing a more targeted or qualified call, then resources used and presentation would be different. This will become apparent as the Share Certificates are delivered.
Post #227....Getting Government policy changed, creating a favourable legislative climate, demonstrating fundability and sustainability over the long term for a proposal, demonstrating widespread and significant support for a proposal, building a consensus of opinion etc. takes rather more than a brown envelope and a stamp for a letter to the Department for Transport I'm afraid.
Martin, DPPT will own the port, not necessarily run it. Owners of SMEs generally run them as well, owners of very large corporations and multi million pound ports more often than not hire competent management and executives to run the business...Do you see members of the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund running the HS1 line? DPPT will be owned by its members. DPPT members are from the communities of Dover, Deal, Sandwich and the surrounding villages. DPPT will be fully representative of a wide cross section of the communities most affected by the port's operation and development and those communities, through DPPT will own the port. The port will be run by professionals.