Published: Wednesday, 7th May, 2008 10:00
WDC spends £780k on land it DOES NOT own
By Andrea Fraser
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CASH: The Play Drome
Money forked out on a piece of land the council does not own has spiralled by an additional £180,000, auditors have revealed.
Figures revealed in June last year showed that £602,000 had been spent on the new waterfront leisure centre site, despite the council not owning the land.
But since then more money has been thrown at the site, taking the total to £780,000.
The blunder — which was the result of the council not being “satisfactorily” informed that it does not own the site — was just one of many highlighted in an internal audit report.
The report looked into building the new leisure facility on Queens Quay and selling the Play Drome site.
The council spent cash decontaminating, remediating and enabling works on the four-acre waterfront site.
But a report to Wednesday’s full meeting of West Dunbartonshire Council said : “The committee was not informed that the legal transfer of the site had still not been accomplished nor that the Play Drome site had not been marketed and therefore, there was a risk that funding might not have been in place.”
Councillors at the meeting shared a number of concerns about the report.
Councillor Craig McLaughlin (SNP) said that the report could not be “brushed under the carpet” and asked councillors to agree to send the controversial document to Audit Scotland.
He said: “This was £780,000 of public money spent on land that we do not own.
“What concerns me is that we would have developed a private piece of land.”
The report also revealed that the sale of the Play Drome site — which was valued at between £8m and £15m last year — would not raise enough money to fund the new waterfront development, which would cost more than £15m to build.
And that the waterfront landowner, Clydeside Regeneration, was willing to extend the current time restrictions on the council purchasing the land, but the company would like this “to coincide with the granting of the detailed planning application” for the housing development on the waterfront.
In a report to councillors, chief executive David McMillan said: “The sale of the Play Drome site for a sum sufficient to build a replacement leisure facility is crucial to the whole project.
“Negotiations have still to be completed with the other parties that have an interest in the site, which could further delay the sale and there is no certainty regarding the value of the site.”
Interest in the Play Drome site has been expressed by a supermarket and the council fears that failure to build a superstore there could open the way for a rival development elsewhere in the town and have a “seriously detrimental effect” on the shopping centre.
Councillors agreed that an up-to-date report will now be submitted to councillors at May’s full council meeting and the internal auditors’ report will be passed on to Audit Scotland.
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