In response to Cllr Gardner, (Wednesday’s Echo) when he discussed WDDC’s accounts, not WDDC’s devastating office-move effect on Dorchester.

Private briefing sessions for ‘members’ screen issues from other important ‘members’… ‘members of the public’.

Councillors may indeed be ‘free to attend’ executive meetings but many work full-time, so aren’t free.

Current ruling-party members do indeed “often vote the same way” – none voted against allocating most of £2million away from Simons’s purse, on to council-tax payers’ purses, to move the church from Charles Street. A report to the executive said ‘a public consultation exercise could be undertaken’ but ‘it is not considered to be appropriate at this stage’.

So, public consultation denied.

Votes by councillors are morally void if they don’t know all critical facts beforehand. As the council offices went up, councillors, retailers and public were unaware it would be 3.1 years after the shopping development construction’s start, before any of 484 Charles St replacement underground parking-spaces could open… news also omitted from all Community Link editions.

Councillors discovered this too late to halt things.

Of course, this plan was unfeasible, so the ruling party (the new offices secured) now propose an entirely different phase 2 (really a phase 3), which the public has never voted on.

Does the £10million for new offices include the loss on the £3.5million promised for the old empty offices?

Who funded the £5million for the library, and what’s the rent-loss on it, still unopened?

I’m again inviting each executive member to discuss these issues with me interactively, publicly, choosing their own chairman.

We must all know the public have now decided democracy is at such a low ebb in West Dorset that many are prepared to set-aside short-term party political hopes to strive for solutions that are truly democratically reached.

John Grantham, Public Holds WDDC to Account