Sir, - While your article reporting the debate over the future of the Richmond station project (D&S, July 2) was an accurate synopsis of the business of the meeting, I felt it important to emphasise points which our trust made at the start of the meeting which were not reported nor fully recognised in the public committee debate which followed.

The "original deadline" to which your headline referred is one which has been established in the past two months. When our work began just over 18 months ago, we understood that there would be two requirements for signing a lease. Firstly, that all of the £2.3m had to be in place and secondly, that the building could not be developed in phases.

To meet these original terms, our estimate was that it would take about 3 years to fulfil these conditions. This is where the 3-year figure came from. We also said that we could take over the building sooner if we could purchase the freehold or if the development could be phased in line with the flow of money into this £2.3m project. We based this estimate upon the time it had taken other projects of a similar scale to go from vision to fruition. Even then, the pace we were setting ourselves would be somewhat brisk.

Many schemes have taken far longer than this, as was emphasised at the start of the meeting. What I said was "onerous" was to ask the board of the trust, on behalf of its members, to sign a full lease in 15 months' time with no opportunity to phase development and with a requirement to have all the money in place.

However, what was not publicly clarified until later in the meeting was that the "deadline" of September 1, 2005, is accompanied by an understanding that development can now be phased if necessary and that it will be sufficient to demonstrate that much of the funding is in place and the rest can be confidently predicted. It is also clear that if funding isn't in place, the matter is to be reported back to the district council for further consideration.

Hence, while the tone of discussion and reporting was one of imposition, the reality is that the position arrived at is one which epitomises the partnership approach since the start. We recognise the council's desire to get things moving and the council recognises that this is achievable if we have more flexibility than was originally proposed - a happy meeting of minds.

The flexibility we asked for as compared to the original position is clearly now available. The signing of a full lease on September 1, 2005, is perfectly reasonable with these revised conditions. We also believe that the motivation behind the councillors desire to achieve this "firming up" is to ensure that the community gets its new facility as soon as possible. We do not believe, as some have asserted, that the push is simply to get cash into the coffers. If this had been the case, the council would surely have simply accepted our offer of purchase at the outset.

The sum of money accruing to the council is ultimately the same , whether freehold or leasehold.

It is also unfortunate that the focus on deadlines and leases in the report meant that there was no space to report Coun Blackie's fulsome praise of the work of the trust itself, not least in securing £250,000 of grant money, which in itself has time deadlines attached. Nor was there any reference made in the report or the meeting to the high regard in which our local trust and the project it is working for is held nationally, particularly because it evidently represents public wishes and has significant public support.

These points are not made to seek praise but rather to show that there should be considerable optimism in the ability of the trust to deliver.

Like the district council and the community, we see no reason for delay. Indeed, we have had to postpone two events which would now have taken place in the station building only because of legal difficulties. We estimate that the voluntary hours spent on this project already must amount to well over 5,000 in total. We want an outcome too.

As a trust, we continue to wish to deliver the project, which residents have asked for and which the council supports, as quickly as possible and, in this regard, have always moved as rapidly as we are able to move the business on. The signing of the pre-let agreement for September 1, 2004, will be a significant step on the road to opening the doors of the station to the community once more.

JIM JACK

Chairman,

Richmondshire Building Preservation Trust.

Hurgill Road,

Richmond