At this morning’s meeting, which was also streamed live on YouTube, the decision was taken to ‘pause’ the Beach Management Plan for 6 months to allow investigations of other options.
This decision was only taken because of a promise that if the implementation of protection for east cliff was going to be delayed longer than the current projection of two years EDDC best efforts would be bent to getting a temporary solution in place. This decision will now be taken to EDDC Cabinet for approval.
East Beach, Pennington Point, and the houses on Cliff Road and further up the hill, are of course the most urgent factors in the battle against fast erosion. However, as far as long term factors are concerned it is the maintaining of the tourist trade which is the most important. There is no point in protecting somewhere where no-one visits and there is no employment to be had.
I will not try to condense a three hour meeting into a short post, if you want to know exactly what was said the video will be up on EDDC’s YouTube channel soon, at the same link as above.
I was however, very pleased that the Chairman, Geoff Jung, gave his thanks for the comprehensive ‘Framework document’ to Jeremy Woodward who was mainly responsible for it, working on behalf of the VGS. Geoff said he thought it would save him a lot of time once we got on to later stages of the project. I (Mary Walden-Till) pointed out that nothing was ‘meant’ by the document it was simply a collection of detailed information about potential problems with the ‘preferred option’, which we are now committed to reassess.
I will put a fuller report up later on the page we have for the Steering Group’s reports, the Steering Group has been renamed to the Advisory Group to better reflect the work it does.