The Voice of Spalding and South Holland
Judging by readers’ comments in The Voice recently, they were all wondering about the “Springfields £1m plus donation” and other payments allowing varying ongoing building works at Springfields, with the last one several months ago involving thousands of pounds to demolish buildings and develop more land.
The point one reader made about the vanity Tulip Radio project that seems to have benefited the directors with the station getting a handout, it does beg the question as to how did they become aware of these payments being available?
Were details published in the local media at the time so that real local worthy deserving causes could also have applied for a share in this amazing pot of gold or was it a case of who you know?
Not so long ago we were asked to dig deep to raise funds to add an additional extension to the Spalding War Memorial. Quite a lot of people held raffles, sponsored this and that, plus straightforward donations from companies, local businesses and the public gave cash donations to this aim and it was very commendable.
In 2018 it was unveiled in time for Remembrance Day that November but the public were perhaps not aware that some of the Springfields £1m plus could have possibly paid for it outright.
If this local monument was not applicable to having it paid for from these ‘donations’ but it was okay for a hardly listened to vanity radio station to gain from it, one has to wonder what is going on or were the ‘rules’ dreamt up over how it was handed out?
Could somebody from the council explain this situation and how much is left in the Springfields pot in plain English.
Have a lot of local people got it wrong or just thought of as being too stupid to understand?
L A Evans
Gedney Road
Long Sutton
(Editor’s note – The payments referred to are Section 106 agreements which are the legal conditions attached to some planning applications. In Springfields’ case this included a fund to be distributed for ‘providing community and social infrastructure, which
would be needed as a result of the development’.)
