At next week’s full council meeting, Island Conservative group leader, Dave Stewart, will be submitting a motion relating to the former Coastal Centre in Ventnor, also known as Salisbury Gardens.
Readers will remember the Isle of Wight cabinet last week approved the recommendation for the transfer of the building to the Ventnor Town Council under a 26 year lease.
That lease also includes the land in front of the building, but with the condition that it cannot be developed on.
Call for a land valuation
Cllr Stewart will next week be calling for the land in front of the building to be separated from the 26 year lease, until its potential value has been assessed.
He asks,
That full council recommends to cabinet that although we support the appropriate transfer and lease of the building as a community asset to Ventnor Town Council that the land associated with the coastal centre is retained by the council until the Cabinet have considered a full assessment of its potential value has been completed.
The motion is at the end of the agenda, following what is historically a very long meeting (budget setting), so it’s unclear whether there’ll be time to hear his motion.
If the meeting runs over time and the council vote to not extend it, the motion will have to go to the March meeting.
Gardens used for festival events
Islanders will be aware the green space at Salisbury Gardens is regularly used for events such as the Isle of Arts Festival.
This was necessary after the former Conservative-led council sold the town’s long-standing entertainment venue, the Ventnor Winter Gardens, to the Hambrough Group for £1.
Over three years since the venue closed its doors, the building now stands derelict and beyond use.
The new owner, Kevin Sussmilch, has declared work will start soon and may see the venue (albeit a massively scaled-down version of what was promised during the tender process) back into use by the summer.
Image: © Used with the kind permission of Richard ‘Tenspeed’ Heaven
