foreshore trust update

Hi, thanks you for signing the petition. The latest news is that I will not in fact be asking the Foreshore Trust to consider purchasing the Pier. When I started the process I thought it would be interesting to ask the Foreshore Trust to consider purchasing the Pier and to act as a Freeholder. A fairly simple question that could be even more interesting when the Trust might consider how much of their £1.1m parking revenue would be reduced by a closed Pier and how other projects like the Source might suffer without the footfall a successful Pier might generate. The concept has been adopted by the Friends of the Pier, the Administrators are interested in it, other Operators could benefit from it. It's a no brainer to at least consider it. Unfortunately what could be interesting has become very stressful. My initial attempt to post the petition on the Council's own website failed due to a combination of failures on their side. Hence I eventually gave up and posted it on the change.org website. Although 310 people signed the petition they now want to verify names and addresses and have suggested I may have to ask my question at another meeting in September! For the sake of making progress they could safely assume 10 people (the target needed to ask the Foreshore Trust a question) out of 310 were from Hastings, but no they can't. I was also told after 310 signatures were gathered that for legal and procedural reasons I couldn't ask a question although this was later proved incorrect. Although I would have had 5 minutes to ask the Foreshore Trustees my question they wanted to create a "report" by Council Officers to answer my question in advance of me asking it. So in fact my question would be pretty much answered by the Council (officers) ahead of me asking the Trustees the very same question. The bottom line throughout this process is that "process" is all that matters to the Council and Foreshore Trust. Yet Council staff don't understand the process themselves. Consequently it feels like they are trying to frustrate, obstruct and stop me asking a fairly innocent question. Any public body should absolutely welcome ideas, suggestions, praise, criticism and what is the opinion of the public it represents. It should actively encourage this but The Foreshore Trust, under the control of Hastings Council clearly do not value the abilitities, skills and talents of it's residents and want to put up barriers to stop people engaging with them and only use ideas generated from within their own organisation. Thanks again for your support. Philip