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.