Councillor Meredith answers the critics

Mrs Flower’s letter about the Newport swimming pool, published in the Newport Advertiser on Friday on the 28th of Dec last, has absolutely no foundation. Clearly this former Borough Councillor knows full well that the present swimming pool has for years been in need of urgent refurbishment. It is old fashioned, out of date and beyond economic repair.

It would seem that Mrs Flowers is so out of touch and set in her ways that she is no longer able to recognise the fact that times are changing, that the town is growing and that a new and modern swimming pool is urgently needed by the majority of the town’s residents. The new pool will form part of a fabulous new and exciting sports complex to be built at a cost of millions of pounds on the Burton Borough site over the next five years. I well remember Mrs Flowers and her Lib Dem counterparts going into raptures when the new sports hall was built on the school site a couple of years ago. They said it was the obvious site which was easily accessible with plenty of car parking, so why then is it any different for the swimming pool?

Mrs Flowers knows better than most that two pools in a town the size of Newport could never be recognised as a viable proposition. It seems that she and her Lib-Dem colleagues are quite prepared to turn her back on the youngsters of Newport in order to keep an old out of date facility running just because decades ago it was funded in part by public donation. The Borough Council would not be justified in funding the hundreds of thousands of pounds it will cost to bring up to scratch what can only be described as a very third rate and out of date facility.

One has to ask the following questions:1)Do the Lib –Dems think they know better than all the experts employed by the Borough Council?, 2) Are the Lib-Dems prepared to fund the modernisation of the old pool and fund the upkeep from there on? The Borough Council KNOW that a new pool with modern facilities offers best value for public funds. My third question is what do the Lib Dems know about the swim times which will be made available to the general public ? The answer can only be as usual NOTHING AT ALL, the pool isn’t even on the drawing board yet. I would suggest that the Lib-Dems stand behind Newport’s four Conservative Borough Councillors in their attempt to bring to Newport the first major public facility since Labour took control some 35 years ago. The present swimming currently caters for all age groups including schools. Why would the new swimming pool be any different?

Cllr Adrian Meredith/