| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:A real centre of culture | |
| Posted by: | Malcolm Grimston | |
| Date/Time: | 11/01/07 08:48:00 |
| Quite simply, saving £400,000 a year revenue from the Museum will improve the local people's finances by £400,000 a year. You will appreciate, also, that it is not as simple as just calculating the extra money needed from council taxpayers to keep the Museum going - we would also need to be sure that of all the variety of nice things we could do with that money keeping the Museum open is the best, and be sure that most people in Wandsworth would be happy to have money taken away to satisfy the pleasures of a very small minority. However, I am open to your idea about residents raising money directly. If, as is suggested by some correspondents, a majority of people in Wandsworth would be prepared to pay more to keep it open then the most direct approach would be for the putative Friends of the Museum to raise £2 million, say, from those people to provide funding for the next five years. This approach could only fail if most people in Wandsworth actually don't feel the Museum is value for money. It's not an ideal solution, as it would still leave us needing a site for a town centre library in Wandsworth (one that people could drop into easily when visiting Southside, in the same way that they can drop into Balham and Putney when shopping there), but it has its attractions - the many people who struggle to pay council tax rates even at their present level would not be hit with extra costs to satisfy the small number of people who use the Museum. It would be helpful to know as soon as possible if that sum is likely to be found, as our proposals will go to the next Environment & Leisure OSC next month. |