Liverpool Councillor Clucas Wants Irish Centre

Councillor Clucas used her position on the council to promote a hair-brained scheme by Dance Liverpool, of which she is Chairman, to take over the derelict Wellington Rooms.
She repeatedly explored with council officials different ways to put pressure on the owner of the Grade 2* listed building which would force him to surrender his leasehold.
She was also behind a bid by the city council to issue a Compulsory Purchase Order on the building so that Dance Liverpool could then happily waltz in.
Amazingly, Clucas promised planning officials that the city council would fund the £50,000 cost of a public inquiry into the CPO (although it's not her money, ed)
When the problems of a lengthy CPO were pointed out, Clucas then argued it would be better for the city council to quickly buy the building for at least £200,000 - and then hand it over to her own organisation! (shurely some conflict of interest here? ed)
Her £200,000 bid came despite the District Valuer valuing the extremely dilapidated building at just £1, with an extra £3million to renovate it!
Clucas, who is a Director of Dance Liverpool, also had planning officials running around like headless chickens pursuing European money for her madcap one-woman scheme.
Clucas strongly urged officials to submit a bid for Euro money to allow the scheme to go-ahead. By complete co-incidence, she also Chairs the European Objective 1 Funding Committee which doles out huge amounts of public money. (what an incredibly strange co-incidence, ed)
There is no record that Clucas declared her interest as a Director of Dance Liverpool at the extraordinary meeting with the city council's Planning Service on 19th December last year.
Official notes of the meeting reveal that Clucas lobbied hard for the organisation, despite serious questions about whether Dance Liverpool had a credible Business Plan (they did not, ed) or whether they had a realistic timetable to convert the Wellington Rooms (ermmmm, it was all to be miraculously completed next year!, ed)
Wearing her Dance Liverpool hat, Clucas seems to have managed to bully weak council officials, including Planning chief Nigel Lee and Conservation chief Steve Corbett, into agreeing a series of action points from the meeting which would all benefit her own organisation.
Clucas forced them to:

* prepare a CPO timetable and report for the Exec Board

* contact other council officers about bidding for Euro money

* try to get legal action taken against the current owner

* review the council's plans for the city centre to make sure the Dance Liverpool scheme fitted in

* even get an invite for Clucas to a 'Stop the Rot' meeting so she could promote Dance Liverpool's plan.

(We wonder if any other member of the public would be able to get the council's planners to do all this work for them? ed)Councillor Clucas has still not declared her interest in Dance Liverpool on the city council's Register of Member's Interests. We shall be returning to this story again..........