I was saddened by Councillor Nigel Reed's article This Pavilion view is flawed' (In My View, Echo, November 12), in which he claimed to be correcting factual inaccuracies in my earlier In My View column Stop the digging now' (November 1).

I try to write in plain English so it is disappointing that a senior councillor finds it so difficult to understand me that he gets hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick.

He ends up misrepresenting what I said and the position that I hold.

Many will have noticed that the answers' frequently bore very little relation to the questions'.

I'm not going to bore readers with a tedious point-by-point commentary.

Actually there is rather a lot of bureaucratic speak and I found some of it about as easy to understand as the public notices that appear in the Echo.

Expert readers of council reports will have recognised the style and spotted the weasel words and half-truths for themselves.

To keep it short, I'd like to make three brief comments and issue a challenge.

When other councillors and I were told that the Pavilion was a sick building past its use-by date I don't think I'm being too fanciful in using the phrase virtually derelict'.

The second point is that other councillors and I were told at a meeting - from which the public was excluded - that we couldn't be trusted with any financial information about the scheme.

At a subsequent meeting we were reluctantly allowed a very vague outline. I can't square that with Coun Reed's professions of everything being done in the open.

Councillors are elected to represent people. Without talking to people it isn't easy to represent them.

On this, the biggest thing in years, councillors have been forbidden to talk to the electors.

Coun Reed says they are frustrated'. Well, they're not making a lot of noise about it. What they are doing, though, is to listen to the briefings' of the developers.

Odd, isn't it, that they are allowed, or even encouraged, to listen to one side of the argument and to comment and question but forbidden to even open their ears to any contrary view. All this, of course, is in the interests of fairness and democracy.

Now here's my challenge. If you look behind the council offices you will see an estate known as Chapelhay Heights, which has 86 flats between Franchise Street and the rear of the council car park.

The original Pavilion area scheme was for about 120 flats, approximately one-and-a-half times the number on the Heights.

This was changed to about 340 or, in other words, roughly four times the number on the Heights. If you're not familiar with Chapelhay have a trip to Portland.

The multi-storey section of the Comer Homes development in Castletown will contain 363 flats, only slightly more than the revised Howard Holdings proposal.

This represented a massive alteration with significant financial consequences. Will Coun Reed point me to the relevant web pages on the borough's site where I can find the record of this proposal being properly debated and resolved by elected members?

Over to you, Nigel.

John Birtwistle, Nothe Parade, Weymouth.