The front page headline of today’s East Devon Express and Echo says “Town Council backs seafront first phase – no objection to road changes paving way for redevelopment”.
The story goes on to say this means they support road realignment, parking areas, demolition of beach huts and DJs Diner, though reservations of some councillors led to deferral of plans for infilling of ponds at the Fun Park.
Campaigners for the Facebook Group “Save Exmouth Seafront” are incredulous that public opinion has not swayed the town councillors. They also point out that no planning application has received permission yet EDDC is committing at least £1.5m for the programme when no developer contribution has been offered towards the work.
Objections to the plans must be made by midday on 27 November 2015.
East Devon Watch 
May I make one small clarification about the Facebook site mentioned.
Save Exmouth Seafront does not have its own FB page but it does make quite heavy use of Exmouth Splash-Public Opinion and Discussion (facebook) Page, and indeed it was from there that many SES supporters came.
However the page is open for anyone to make comment regardless of their opinion and the only intervention by those administering are in respect of removing offensive language-and I can only think of one instance.
Thinking it is the SES page is perhaps an easy mistake to make and it looks like a senior Tory councillor on the regeneration team made such a mistake when saying he thought it was the social media site that an Exmouth councillor showed him as demonstrating support for the EDDC Splash proposals.
As the person who set up the page I have to say that I cannot understand how anyone could come to such a conclusion given that the vast majority of posters, and there have been very many, are not in favour of the project as proposed. I readily accept that there are number in support, but they are very heavily outnumbered by those with reservations.
I find it rather worrying that anyone should claim, based upon such flimsy and incorrect ‘evidence’, that Exmouth supports the project – but then the more I ask for evidence of support for many of EDDC’s claims, the more that I find it doesn’t exist. (See whatdotheyknow.gov for FOIs re other evidence requests)
In the Exmouth Town Council debate about the road realignment, it is said that one Tory councillor made a comment, when the problem of flooding was mentioned, along the lines of ” it is a watersports centre so it won’t matter if the road floods’!” Is it any wonder that SES members were astounded by the decision or the reasoning!
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