Council has Exmouth’s back – Tim  reminisces on “times past” under the “Old Guard” in EDDC  

Paul Arnott’s comment on Town Council meetings reminds me of the fights we had with the old EDDC over transparency. At one time the EDDC meetings about The Splash/Sideshore, or as I prefer to call it, Cohen’s Folly, was restricted to a small group of people who held their meetings in private and initially didn’t produce or publish proper minutes. It took quite a bit of argument to change that, to get minutes made and published, and more general transparency. I recall the EDDC officer running the matter publishing draft minutes by accident once, and when challenged, they produced a final record with some interesting differences.

It is worth comparing an EDDC that records and publishes many of it’s meetings on YouTube, making access easier to all who may want it, to the old EDDC. I remember when Williams, Diviani, Moulding and others were running the show and government allowed any council who so wanted, to allow citizen reporting and filming of public meetings. The old EDDC wouldn’t have any of it, we had to wait until government obliged councils to allow such recording, and even then EDDC tried to curtail it by asking for notice (a condition that was not a requirement by gov).

Yes, Exmouth seems to be split on everying you care to ask its citizens about. Some do a bit of digging, others show no interest until someone raises it on Facebook and then asks about why didn’t they know about it. And of course there is a hard core who say you will never change anything in Exmouth- I think they may still be unaware that things have changed considerably, not least in matters of transparency and what group runs the council.

Knowing Paul pretty well, and bearing his comments about Romans and watching our back, I am quite certain I shall never need to say to him “Et Tu Brute?”