I think it really pays to know someone in the legal profession.
I’ve been negotiating over a second venue for the SCIBAse exhibition, for the last month and from the very start, I made it very clear that we were a non profit organisation and did not have the funds to pay rental costs.
I felt like I’d made a breakthrough when the acting vendor offered a much less salubrious location within the building ‘at no cost’. Now, when I think of ‘no cost’, I assume that it means that I didn’t have to pay anything. Obviously, that has a different meaning to anyone in the trade. It was at no cost other than, a licence fee of £750 per month, up to £750 solicitors fees to draw up a contract AND utility bills at a business rate.
I’d had experience of a licence before – when using empty shops as a venue, so I wasn’t alarmed by that. ( For those not aware of what a licence is…and in layman’s terms, a document is issued with all the do’s and don’ts while using their building. The premises must be returned to the state it was given, or you pay a fee)
So… in my ignorance, I assumed that the £750 licence fee was only payable if there was some damage to the building.
Hmmm…it appears not and this is where my legal friend has stepped in – well before I became rash enough to sign anything!
I have now sent an email requesting that all fees are wavered.
Anyone else would probably walk away from this one, but with legal backing, I just want to see if its possible to make headway.
Writing a statement is hard enough at the best of times, but having spent so long searching for words or pseudo intellectual phrases to pad one out to give it enough bulk, we now found ourselves in the awkward situation of having to reduce it all back down again to a mere sentence or two.
For the Independents profile page in the brochure , we needed to cut down our former statements to what I thought was 500 words, but was in fact 500 characters….and then worse – less than 500 characters including spaces!
I’m nervous now that what it has been cut down to doesn’t actually say anything at all about us.
Today, on top of everything else I need to do on my day off, I will yet again chase up a unit that was at one time promised to us, but now they are hankering on about charging ‘the going rate’.
Same with empty shops – a prime location one was whisked from my hands ‘in case it is snapped up by a paying tenant’. What paying tenant? There are so many empty shops now in the City Centre – why on earth won’t they put them to some use?
Well…. we’ve registered : http://www.independentsbiennial.org/2012/07/18/2012-registered-group-scibase/
Easy as it looks to get to this stage, actually took months and months of planning. The ideas we had formulated had to be changed so dramatically, as venue after venue that we had been chasing, faced either extreme financial difficulties , or just disappeared off the planet. It really was a scary thought that we had received this funding from ACE and other sponsors, but had nowhere to go.
Getting into the swing of blogging again, will take some effort, so I’m just touching base here and letting everyone know – ACE in particular (!) that we are still here and we are moving forward.
