SIR — I would like to reply to Mr Bang's letter (Free Press June 16).
I was involved with SWAMP at the public enquiry last year and I think I should clarify what SWAMP stood for — "Sink Watchet's Appalling Marina Plan".
Our bid to stop this scheme was unsuccessful and we as an organisation can go no further with regard to the marina, because we decided that we should not attempt to defeat the project on a legal technicality, but rather watch it fail on its own inherent faults.
In our letter to the chief executive of West Somerset District Council, we asked that:
1. All planning applications for Watchet Marina and East Quay developments are dealt with by an authority outside West Somerset.
2. Detailed plans for the East Quay development be produced now, before the construction of the marina is started, not after the marina is completed.
In these requests we believe that we represent the majority of Watchet people ie. the 800 plus who voted in the referendum against the scheme as a whole or against the housing on the East Quay.
I would like Mr Bangs to produce the detailed plans for the East Quay which he seems privy to, or is he being led astray by artists' impressions?
With regard to his point on job-creating schemes, I think a couple of monkeys from Bristol Zoo could come up with a scheme that would create more full-time jobs than the marina will ever create.
I think it unnecessary to make flippant remarks about preservation orders on slabs of concrete. He must realise it's too late for that now. He and the pro-marina group have "thrown out the baby with the bath water".
The rumoured retail outlets proposed for the East Quay will certainly create competition for Swain Street but not, I think, real jobs.
The best anyone with any regard for the structure of Watchet can do is conduct a damage limitation exercise and try to prevent the wholesale destruction of all the free and open space in Watchet.
R M Watts,
Gladstone Terrace,
Watchet.