Supplementary question dodged
Yesterday Wednesday 18th May, before a full Council , Cllr McGarrigle
told us that because the Ladywell Leisure Centre's Turkish Suite,
comprising Turkish Bath and Sauna was in need of replacement they had
of course looked at the cost of replacing the lot, and had considered
that because the centre was anyway supposed to close in 2010, they
didn't think it was in their interest to invest in it.
This is the answer to our supplementary question which was of course another one.
It was a question designed to ascertain whether the reason behind this
decision had been of either malicious or incompetent nature.
It was also a question about why the Sauna was not mentioned in the answer.
We explained the Mayor and the Council that yesterday we had called Nordic Saunas Ltd
head office and asked the price of an average community sauna for
leisure centre and that such price was £4500 including
installation.
Because at last count in 1994, the LLC had over 400,000 entries per
year, supposing that only 1% of attendants have a sauna, at a cost of
just above £1 each the sauna would have paid itself in the first year
starting to generate an income with the second.
Therefore the decision had to be either malicious - motivated by the
desire to drive down the number of users so to have an easier ride when
closing the leisure centre - or incompetent.
So, to ascertain the true nature of this decision, we just have to know
whether the Mayor knew roughly the price of a sauna before taking the
decision.
That's what we asked: "did the Mayor know roughly the price of a sauna prior to us telling him?"
As Cllr Mc Garrigle replied to our
question, the Mayor of Lewisham, Steve Bullock, kept on reading some important papers.
The effort that she put into trying to avoid answering moved her into hilarious ground.
As usual her delivery was extremely asserive and full of "of course" and "naturally" and "clearly".
If we had been less sure of the merits of our research we could have
really believed that we're such idiots that never understood such
simple concepts.
But knowing what we know, the best that we can say is that we feel
very sorry for a member of cabinet forced to stand in front of a full
council and make a speech based on a farsical pretence of being able
only to imagine a large investment for a sauna and a turkish bath bundled together (as Turkish Bath Suite) and not a smaller one for a sauna only.
One thing that she admitted (of course, naturally and clearly) is that it was not in their interest (what about ours?) to invest in the LLC.
The pressure that the Mayor and his entourage are feeling is visible
and to ease it they'll soon have to let the steam out of the sauna.
We can help them opening that door. There are a number of discrepancies
in the stories that the Council come up with to try to justify this
decision, and at the next Council Meetings we'll be back there with
more questions for the Mayor to answer to.
