Well, it’s taken a couple of days to let the dust settle, before I could face writing this blog entry. Monday evening there was a full council meeting which Laurence and I bent over backwards to get to. We had sent some e-mails of support at the last minute and a brief summary of the proposal closely tied into the council’s vision. Once seated we discovered that it was no longer on the agenda and after a whispered carfuffle with the deputy clerk we discovered the decision had been made in a private meeting earlier in the day with the political representatives. Despite being invited by the Council to put this proposal together with the full intention of drawing people into this central city council building, the political representatives decided if they are to provide rooms free as in kind support for the project ‘it may set a precedent to other organisations and therefore they could not agree to support it’.
As you can imagine we were less than happy, from not having the opportunity to defend our case, from not having been given the full information on the developments in policy in regard to the buildings, (as we discovered later) and for not being informed about the meeting etc. In fact rather a lot of things. And so today, I’m licking my wounds and emailing everyone involved. Laurence and I will meet next week over coffee with the curator to discuss what we can salvage from all this work but as the project was so closely woven into the fabric of the building, I’m not sure how that will progress. In response to the councils email the following day I constructed a factual, but in retrospect, rather strong email back. I forwarded it to Laurence for her opinion but in the end sent it off just as an email came from Laurence advising we should tread more carefully. Oh dear, it doesn’t look like I’ll have many friends at the council in future!
