The first Chamber of Trade meeting of 2017 took place on Tuesday 17th Jan at the Dartmouth Yacht Club. It was hailed as a great success by the organisers on their Facebook page: see below
Click on the links above to see the presentations given at the meeting.
Yours truly was unable to attend due to an operation on my torn quadriceps tendon that same day (Pictures available if required) however the questions I would have asked at the meeting as a fully paid up member would have been as follows:
1. This slide was a part of the presentation, and talks about the ambition of getting stakeholders working together for the good of business in the town!
My question is - the list of stakeholders is almost exactly the same as the composition of the BID task force with the exception of BRNC. This group met regularly over a 11 month period in 2013, consulted with over 160 businesses in Dartmouth (100 of them face to face) and agreed a long term business plan for the next 5 years which formed the basis of the BID plan. The businesses voted 2 to 1 in favour of the plan however Cllr Dave Cawley, as he was at the time, voted against the plan.
My question therefore is:
How will you convince these same stakeholders that you will listen to what they have to say this time?
I also agree that the town must recover from the failure of the BID and move on positively. What it must not do though is to ignore the lessons learnt from the BID. So my next question to the Chamber (which initiated the BID) is:
What lessons can we draw from the BID and how do we avoid the same mistakes again?
I did ask these questions privately before the meeting to avoid a public debate but I did not get any answers so I reproduce them here. Sorry!
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