Our new slalom course at Howsham will be music to your ears Dave.
The Mill have just agreed to a floodlit 16+ gate slalom course down the mill race pool and channel.
We are just organising the ground-works and floodlighting that will start in September.
The pool of the mill race has a series of fast waves with strong swirling eddies that then runs into a fast flowing channel that will have a further 6 eddies cut out for upstreams.
The floodlighting will be generated by the water-wheel that produces the course. We propose to charge £2.00 to go on the course (all day if you like) that will go to the mill's restoration fund and for maintenance of the course.
So if anyone fancies a bit of spade work on 10th and 25th September please let me know. Any volunteers can camp on the island and get some paddling in on the wier and our other gates as well.
Phil Stephenson
philstephenson@compuserve.com
07767 612884
Legacy ??????? - Div 1 Calendar
We will be posting a start list in the next few days ( closing date for entries is tomorrow, 2 weeks before) and further details will be posted as we get them!!! So watch this space.
Any news on this Anne, as I have not seen nor heard anything yet, and still need to know whether I need a campsite for Saturday night or not...
I think you will be lucky to get much more news at the moment... The whole committee us working at the Test Event at the moment and everyone is working long days. Andy will be finalising the start list on Sun eve or Mon when we get home. Not sure when Anne will know about the tests as I have not been working in the same area as her, sorry...
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Jerry Tracey
- Posts: 76
- Joined: Fri Nov 12, 2004 11:09 am
Congratulations to Phil and Howsham Mill - This is more like it!
In my opinion we are being had by commercial operators of facilities that were initially built using large amounts of public (ie. our) money.
Earlier this month I spent a Saturday afternoon on Cesson Sévigné near Rennes, Britanny (a pumped course!) for 4.50 Euros!
Many French regional level venues would be highly enjoyable for our Div. 2 and 3 paddlers. For ideas, try exploring:
www.eauxvives.org/en/slalom/liste
In my opinion we are being had by commercial operators of facilities that were initially built using large amounts of public (ie. our) money.
Earlier this month I spent a Saturday afternoon on Cesson Sévigné near Rennes, Britanny (a pumped course!) for 4.50 Euros!
Many French regional level venues would be highly enjoyable for our Div. 2 and 3 paddlers. For ideas, try exploring:
www.eauxvives.org/en/slalom/liste
Dave I agree with you in respect of facilities funded and developed for sports however they are expected to not only cover their costs but to make a profit which unfortunately is much easier with rubber buses than pointy things. If they were making money from television rights then I am certain they could even be considering begging us to run relevant races. To get to this (in the absence of a massive legacy from somewhere) we have to expand the sport and make it more attractive to the media. The BBC are going to need something to replace Formula 1 and the £30 million spent on it! We need more paddlers and more medals. I believe it can improve as a spectator sport.
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John Sturgess
- Posts: 280
- Joined: Thu May 27, 2004 12:01 am
- Location: Gedling, Nottingham/Long Preston, North Yorkshire
A lot of this comes from a cultural problem we have in this country: and from our point of view particularly in central government, local government, and Sport England - which runs the Lottery Sports Fund.
Capital Funding is separated from Revenue Funding where sport - and other Community needs - are concerned. When you fill in a Grant Application Form you are asked to show how a project will be self-funding within, usually, three years. Any revenue funding will only cover that three year period.
Where revenue funding is available it has to be tied to ‘a project’ - doing something new. And again, you will have to show how this project will be self-funding after some date in the future - usually again three years.
Of course this does not apply to schools, or to hospitals, or to roads, or to nuclear submarines (the latter might be interesting: a business plan for hiring them out to Al Quaeda?). Which category an area falls into was originally a political decision, and says something about political priorities. However it then becomes set in stone, and is hard to alter; which says something about bureaucratic attitudes.
Other countries have different priorities: particularly France, where it is assumed that sporting facilities have the same sort of public good as hospitals or schools. Therefore the public bodies which provide the capital funding also provide revenue funding to cover either part of the revenue cost (like the pumped course at Cergy - in a Regional Park) or the whole of the revenue cost (like the new cross-country ski-ing facility in the Jura - or indeed the Regional Park at Cergy as a whole). That often includes local government paying for the cost of a coach for each club using the facilities that the council provides. The local club has to pay a fee per hour to use the pumped course at Cergy - but it does not cover anywhere near the full running cost, and is not meant to.
Another thing that other countries seem to handle more sensibly than we do is the balance between the revenue that might be collected, and the cost of collecting that revenue (I sometimes ask my colleagues why we charge people to go into swimming pools but not into parks. The answer is very simple: we can: swimming pools have one entrance; parks have lots, all of which would have to be manned. That is why the Jura facility is free).
However it does not seem likely that the attitude towards sporting facilities in his county is going to change. Therefore Slalom needs, I think, to consider very carefully the dangers of tying development to pumped courses. I am currently looking at this as part of the Strategic Review of Slalom.
The Holme Pierrepont situation is different. The need for revenue, and therefore the priority given to rafting, arises not in the main from the cost of running the course itself, but from two extraneous factors:
(i) When the site was handed back to Nottinghamshire County Council they insisted on treating it as one business unit. So there is an enormous need for revenue to subsidise what I cynically describe as ‘the hotel’.
(ii) Local Government always seems to operate on the basis of large-scale employment: so revenue has also to be raised to pay for the costs of staffing, including the staffing of the Slalom Course (as I nostalgically call it).
When Nottinghamshire CC were about to take over, they mounted a ‘consultation’, inviting, amongst others, District Councils to respond. They listed three alternatives, all involving large-scale capital expenditure, to be recouped through large putative revenue targets. Gedling Borough Council’s response (because I wrote it) was to propose a fourth alternative: dynamite the hotel, and you are left with a low-maintenance water feature in a country park, like Augsburg. Don’t staff it: put up notices saying that the public use it at their own risk (see Thomlinson vs. Christleton District Council and Cheshire County Council for the effect of this). Oddly enough we never got a reply! Any suggestion on these lines is met by references to ‘duty of care’. But the duty of care is not an absolute: if you man a facility you have a greater duty of care than if you simply put up notices.
Capital Funding is separated from Revenue Funding where sport - and other Community needs - are concerned. When you fill in a Grant Application Form you are asked to show how a project will be self-funding within, usually, three years. Any revenue funding will only cover that three year period.
Where revenue funding is available it has to be tied to ‘a project’ - doing something new. And again, you will have to show how this project will be self-funding after some date in the future - usually again three years.
Of course this does not apply to schools, or to hospitals, or to roads, or to nuclear submarines (the latter might be interesting: a business plan for hiring them out to Al Quaeda?). Which category an area falls into was originally a political decision, and says something about political priorities. However it then becomes set in stone, and is hard to alter; which says something about bureaucratic attitudes.
Other countries have different priorities: particularly France, where it is assumed that sporting facilities have the same sort of public good as hospitals or schools. Therefore the public bodies which provide the capital funding also provide revenue funding to cover either part of the revenue cost (like the pumped course at Cergy - in a Regional Park) or the whole of the revenue cost (like the new cross-country ski-ing facility in the Jura - or indeed the Regional Park at Cergy as a whole). That often includes local government paying for the cost of a coach for each club using the facilities that the council provides. The local club has to pay a fee per hour to use the pumped course at Cergy - but it does not cover anywhere near the full running cost, and is not meant to.
Another thing that other countries seem to handle more sensibly than we do is the balance between the revenue that might be collected, and the cost of collecting that revenue (I sometimes ask my colleagues why we charge people to go into swimming pools but not into parks. The answer is very simple: we can: swimming pools have one entrance; parks have lots, all of which would have to be manned. That is why the Jura facility is free).
However it does not seem likely that the attitude towards sporting facilities in his county is going to change. Therefore Slalom needs, I think, to consider very carefully the dangers of tying development to pumped courses. I am currently looking at this as part of the Strategic Review of Slalom.
The Holme Pierrepont situation is different. The need for revenue, and therefore the priority given to rafting, arises not in the main from the cost of running the course itself, but from two extraneous factors:
(i) When the site was handed back to Nottinghamshire County Council they insisted on treating it as one business unit. So there is an enormous need for revenue to subsidise what I cynically describe as ‘the hotel’.
(ii) Local Government always seems to operate on the basis of large-scale employment: so revenue has also to be raised to pay for the costs of staffing, including the staffing of the Slalom Course (as I nostalgically call it).
When Nottinghamshire CC were about to take over, they mounted a ‘consultation’, inviting, amongst others, District Councils to respond. They listed three alternatives, all involving large-scale capital expenditure, to be recouped through large putative revenue targets. Gedling Borough Council’s response (because I wrote it) was to propose a fourth alternative: dynamite the hotel, and you are left with a low-maintenance water feature in a country park, like Augsburg. Don’t staff it: put up notices saying that the public use it at their own risk (see Thomlinson vs. Christleton District Council and Cheshire County Council for the effect of this). Oddly enough we never got a reply! Any suggestion on these lines is met by references to ‘duty of care’. But the duty of care is not an absolute: if you man a facility you have a greater duty of care than if you simply put up notices.
As much as I would love to see that it would deprive the young people of today a chance to experience what it was like to stay in a state of the art hotel in the 70's. I thought I was in a Randall and Hopkirk Theme hotel.John Sturgess wrote:was to propose a fourth alternative: dynamite the hotel, and you are left with a low-maintenance water feature in a country park, like Augsburg.
I read your post with interest