THE fate of Minehead's Vulcan Road car park could effectively be sealed tonight (Friday). West Somerset councillors will meet to approve the council's corporate plan - which includes the sale of the car park. And if they do that, they will then be asked to pick one of three developers - Chelverton Developments, David McLean or Henry Boot - to form a partnership with the authority for the site's development. The matter is scheduled to be discussed in open session, but no real details will be available as the three developers are only referred to as "A, B and C" in a briefing paper and members of the public attending the meeting will not know who or what the council is discussing. Councillors themselves will face a dilemma as they are being told their choice is merely for a developer and not an actual scheme for the car park site. Members have already been given a private presentation from each of the developers and are being asked to bear those in mind when reaching a decision. It is believed at least two of the developers are favouring schemes involving Lidl or Tesco, while all three are believed to have offered only a fraction of what councillors were told the site was worth - around £4 million as opposed to the £8 to £11 million touted by senior officers in 2005. The briefing paper to the council warns councillors not to discuss any financial details of the scheme in public and advises members that they can ask for the item to be held in private should they wish to talk about "sensitive information". The approach appears to have been adopted after details of a previous private council meeting, when councillors were told that Asda did not want to open a store in Minehead, appeared in the Free Press just 48 hours later. However, one leading councillor has already given an indication that a scheme featuring Tesco is the front runner - despite the fact that Vulcan Road was meant to be developed to provide competition for the supermarket's existing Minehead store. The briefing paper shows councillors are not clear about what to do following the presentations from the three developers. "Not surprisingly, given the topic, there were not many areas where there was general consensus," it says. "It would be inappropriate to report on matters where there wasn't agreement without accurately reporting on everything." The paper appears to steer councillors to pick between two of the developers as their presentations contained more details than the third. "All three presentations were professional and included input from surveyors/valuers and architects. "A and B were, however, considered to be better briefed and better able to answer questions raised at the meeting. "It should be re-emphasised, however, that the council is not actually selecting a scheme at this stage but, instead, someone to work with to develop a scheme." The paper also informs councillors that the authority has received two "unsolicited offers" to buy the land, but they did not have to be considered as "the matter was subject to an agreed pre-disposal process at this time".
