Present: Alison Burnley, Madeleine Harding, Brian Mayes, Laurie Naumann, Eileen Schott, Henry Thompson (in the clerk's chair)
Prevented: Phil Lucas, Rufus Reade
AB identified some commercial estate agents, and spoke with a local agent: his estimate for 1 large room, 2 smaller rooms, kitchen and lavatories was 150 to 200 thousand pounds, in the centre of Edinburgh.
This would require not only selling 7VT but also at least one of the flats.
Our current Meeting Room is 792sq ft, as is the hall.
Not clear how quickly we could sell, or what a realistic cost for a building that would suit us would be, that is, not clear that we could get a building with an 800sq ft room for 200 thousand.
If we remain a central meeting, we need at least that much space, as the Meeting Room is full on busy Sundays. If we are split up, what does that do to our community?
ES looked at out-of-town 'units', semi-industrial, no costings retained. Windows are an issue, and of course conversion costs would be high.
ES looked at our rental charges and those of some other church hall rentals in the area. The figures look broadly comparable to ours, so there is not much scope for raising prices to get more income. ES was impressed by the quality of the website the Meeting House uses to present itself to potential renters. Having a manager on site also meant our response time was much better than most of the other sites.
We'll try to have tabulated responses by our next meeting, at which point we can combine across different groups
We agreed that dividing up the writing work makes sense, and HST agreed to try to move us forward on the draft table of contents so that we can begin to agree who will contribute what writing. HST said that he envisages having both a report on our work, covering all the information we've gathered, probably quite substantial, and a much shorter 'executive summary'.
What about soliciting forward-looking input from various constituencies? Time is short, but we need to give people an opportunity to contribute to the vision.
We will have two open meetings to give people the opportunity to share their visions of the future with us: 3 p.m. on 3 May and 7:30pm on 4 May.
ES shared her idea of a public participation (experiential) means of presenting our findings and helping the AM to understand our findings, maybe at AM on 6 June, or afterwards.
HST to get the Kath Russell report [done]
HST to ask John Phillips for an electronic version of his notes for us [done]
HST to ask Ken Jobling where to find the details of how food hygiene regulations apply depending on exactly what's happening. [overtaken]
HST to invite Mark Hutcheson to one of our meetings at his earliest convenience, as Convenor of AM Trustees. [done]
ES to get some costs of out-of-town units
HST to get publicicity out about the vision input meetings.
Our next meeting will be at 7 Victoria Terrace at 5:30pm on Friday 24 April. We tentatively agreed on Friday 1 May 5:30pm for our next meeting after that.