THE city council is about to conclude its search for a developer for Silver Hill.  It’s not been a good process and its arcane criteria have excluded many fine developers, especially local ones.  Nor has it been quick process.  Four and a half years and a lot of money has been dissipated by council officers, and well-paid consultants, since the Supplementary Planning Document was adopted.

I know that the Leader of the council cares about the city’s heritage, but it’s essential and fundamental to the eventual success of Silver Hill that no commitment, conditional or otherwise, is made to the developer before the council undertakes and completes a full archaeological investigation of the whole site.

In July, the council announced that it was going to investigate four good-sized trial pits within the site, and that the work would be supervised by archaeology experts.  In the normal course of events, depending upon what was found, those investigations would lead to others, but they have not yet even been started.

However, good the developer might be, the moment the council cedes control of the site, the archaeological investigations will be undermined by the financial and other pressures a developer inevitably encounters.  Moreover, the council will lose all its options, including not developing the site, at least not yet, if something remarkable is found down there.

There is an order of play to the development process which the council has failed to respect before, and just when it’s on the cusp of making genuine progress it would be a tragedy if it made the same mistakes again.  I guess we’ll know quite soon.

Kim A Gottlieb,

East Stratton

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