The Public - Odds and Sods

Just a short round-up about The Public. Once again it is fundamental that the College is NOT part of the Council but completely independent of it.

1.   The Jones Lang LaSalle reports have still not been disclosed either in respect of The Public or The Town Hall. The taxpayer paid a mere £50,500 ex vat for these.

2.   SMBC have recently changed the locks on The Public.Cost?

3.   Messrs UKIP put in Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to both Sandwell Council (SMBC) and Sandwell College (SC)  for release of all the redacted (hidden) minutes of the SMBC "Cabinet" and the SC "Board" relating to The Public but at the time of writing I understand there has been no disclosure (indeed SMBC have requested "extra time" to release information which would take literally seconds to disclose). The College has not even published its "Board" minutes from October yet, let alone December. Such is life in the secret state of Sandwell.

4.   Recently the lights have been burning late into the night in the empty building. Very "green" + cost?

5.   The "leader" of SMBC made two very curious tweets in July in response to a tweet from a protected account which I am unable to read. I am sure they cannot be anything to do with The Public (or can they?) No doubt Cooper will hasten to clarify.

     (a) From Cooper 05/07/13, "Backed for the money from other partners. Who'd say no to a £50M investment in 1 of our towns #westbrom Up the Baggies!"

     (b) Again in response to the same "protected" correspondent - From Cooper 05/07/13, "Not Council project Baggie. Was a Council rescue and indeed a waste of money."

      What can all this mean?

6.   Of course, Cooper infamously tweeted this on 10/08/13, "The building can be converted by the college at no cost to the council with an arts and community theme. The best of both". This is what is popularly known as "bollocks".

7.   The whole rationale for the pathetic deal as far as we can tell from SC is that they need extra space for the 6th form (as above, they are spoiled for choice in Sandwell but want to steal a trophy building). There is now a rumour that it is going to be too expensive to remove the theatre from The Public and so the college drama department are going to move in! I stress this is only a rumour and, naturally, no facts are forthcoming from either of the taxpayer-funded bodies involved here. Anyone who has ever been in The Public could tell that to remove the theatre would be very costly. I can't build a sandcastle but noted all this via twitter back in October. This begs the question of what will happen to the purpose-built theatre at the college in their year-old taxpayer-funded £77M building if all this is true? Why couldn't SC simply rent the theatre at The Public (bringing in income and also making it available for shows, comedy etc organised by The Public) and build their crappy "modular classrooms" in the Spon Lane theatre? All this is also indicative of the whole "back of an envelope" planning (sic) behind this attempted theft.

(As an aside here, if this nonsense proceeds and it IS true that the theatre will remain the building costs for the conversion SHOULD be considerably less than the mere £6.67M quoted to date but don't bank on it when this work has not been put out to tender. Also Messrs Arup were involved in all this via Interserve/Sandwell Futures - they were the ones who costed the London Olympics bid at £2.4B and it ended up costing more that £9B!!!!!!)

STOP PRESS 1. Kicking the corpse - not satisfied with the damage he and his cronies have done already, Cooper took to the twittersphere last night in a double-hander from someone who appears to be an employee of SMBC to allege that the visitor figures at The Public were "fiddled".

STOP PRESS 2. Anyone wishing to see The Kremlin's modus operandi should have a look at the agenda for tonight's Asset Management Committee meeting. In a heavily redacted report, apparently cash-rich SMBC intends to facilitate a private developer to build an ice rink in West Brom. Two of three reports are completely secret and the third is heavily redacted. This is the first paragraph of the "public" (sic) version:

         "The Council has been approached by the company xxxxx xxxx, who wish to develop an ice rink within West Bromwich. Officers have had preliminary meetings with company representatives and a mechanism for the delivery has been agreed in principle."

And so it appears any old "developer" can gain easy access to Council officers. The plan is to demolish the Queen Square car park (which even SMBC admit will lead to loss of revenue (!)) and to grant a lease to the developer (no competition, of course). The demolition job will not go out to tender but the Council's "demolition partner" has helpfully provided a secret quote. And finally......cash-rich SMBC are going to PAY for the demolition to help the development proceed! Cuts? What cuts?

Contact -  thesandwellskidder@gmail.com