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Vintage Cobbler
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I am in complete agreement with Tel concerning the Council.
Beware of shifting sands. Only a few months after NBC set out its “red lines” the first one appears to be dropped, that is condition 1 – the insistence on the signing of the deed of surrender by CDNL (i.e. KT/DB). This would settle the leasehold footprint from the back of the East Stand to the middle of the running track in favour of NTFC and, most important, its future owners and us the supporters. Remember KT said this was the one issue holding up completion of the East Stand. As soon as the Council agreed to this correction our owners move the goalposts, refuse to sign the legal document and seek to make finishing the East Stand conditional on the wider development, which we all know is why they are here in the first place. We can place no trust in our owners to do anything other than look after their own interests. They will pay lip service to acting in the best interests of the club. In the meantime KC will have to manage playing matters with a modest League 2 budget. Supporter indifference is going to be a big factor in “football man” KT succeeding in being “developer man”. Supporters need to find their voices.
That such an “error” affecting NTFC’s leasehold land should have been made or allowed to have occurred is an example (there are plenty more but that is for another day) of the incompetence of the Council. Whether there is more to this than gross negligence is for the police investigation to determine but it is certainly questionable.
What seems to have escaped many is that CDNL has 2 long leases from the Council – the first from the eastern edge of the running track to the back of the East Stand (which covers the area that is already part of the NTFC lease) and the second is a much larger area which encompasses the North Car Park, the overflow car park, the refuse tip and land going towards Franklin Gardens. It looks to me that having permanently lost the South Car Park our other car parks are at risk. Traffic chaos on match-days could be the outcome. The leases were acquired by KT/DB from the Liquidators of CDNL for a paltry sum of £170,000. Again, the Council were utterly inept in ever allowing this to happen.
What I am saying, and this is where I would disagree fundamentally with Beds, is that the Council must bear great responsibility for the present dismal situation. On the plus side the Council is listening and the current Leader and CEO are not tainted with any responsibility for the mess they have inherited. But my concern is that, as we may be seeing, the interests of development and profit reign supreme. It is more likely than not that we will see a re-run of the 2013 structure under which the Council receives a significant capital sum for selling the freehold to CDNL (it was to be £6.5 million previously) and a share in the plot sales above an agreed figure (in 2013 it was to be 50% of the gross above £110 million). The result will be the Council recovering the “missing millions” plus, plus, KT & DB will make millions probably by selling on CDNL with planning permission for a very big sum and, if we are lucky, we may get a completed but totally unsatisfactory East Stand. All the signs are that our owners won’t spend a penny on doing what they committed to doing in 2015 without “satisfactory planning permission” for the wider development. This may well be well into the future – years not months. Draw your own conclusions on the owners acting in the best interests of the club. So far they have taken the Council to the cleaners and the club is burdened with debt and owners unwilling to invest in its infrastructure.
On the land behind the East Stand to the middle of the athletics track, I suspect that in the final analysis KT/DB are not that concerned. Their eyes are on the wider development and the prospects of big profits. The winners will be KT/DB and the Council, the losers NTFC, future owners, supporters and generations of supporters to come, that is if we have a club to support.
Stand up and fight.
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