We attach below an emailed response from the Coop development manager
Dear Cllr,
Thank you for your recent letter – I hope you don’t mind me replying via E mail rather than a paper letter. The Co op is committed to being as sustainable as possible and as such E mail is our preferred method of communication.
As you say we are hoping to bring the Bridge of Allan community a new and improved food store on the site of our existing store which as you will be aware is not providing the community, our members and colleagues with the best possible shopping and working environment.
We very much want to hear the views of all sections of the community and it is our intention to consult with the entire community including of course the Parish and Community Councils.
Before we do this however we need to first speak with the Council’s Planning and Highways Officers as they represent the Local Planning Authority (LPA). Our first point of contact has to be with the professional Officers for two reasons.
Firstly it would be disrespectful not to observe the proper order of things in this matter and to do this we need to speak with the LPA first. That is not to say the LPA are more important than other stakeholders but they are the decision makers in planning terms and we would always speak to them in the first instance.
Secondly it would serve no purpose to consult the wider community on proposals that the LPA would not accept. For example if the Highways officers deemed a proposal to be dangerous it would be pointless to present these proposals to the community as the plans could never come into fruition without satisfying Highways Officers.
That is not to say that all the views of all stakeholders are not equally important and we certainly would not be presenting proposals to the Parish and Community Council’s as a “done deal”. We would welcome their views and input.
We have to take the views of all parties into account and to do this we will organise consultation events for the whole community including the Community and Parish Councils to input into our proposals. We will be taking steps to organise this once our discussions with Officers are complete and we look forward to hearing the views of all stakeholders.
Thanks
Chris Beebe
Regional Planning Manager (North/Scotland/NI/IOM)
Group Property
From this letter it appears that the new store would be sited where the the existing one is,if this is the case it would be OK by me. Perhaps you could confirm this?
Hi Morris,
I’m not sure that is what is proposed. I suspect they refer to the site as being the entire site as opposed to the exg building footprint.
Regards,
Michael
On behalf of Bridge of Allan Community Council
You are right. I think this guy has little idea of how things work here. I suspect he has never visited the site in person and is just using line drawings of area. Keep your eye on this guy!!