‘FED UP’ members of Moffat’s Proudfoot Institute (PI) will vacate the building by September, if a new agreement can’t be reached.
The Proudfoot Indoor Sports and Social Club (PISC) has been locked in a back and forth with the legal arm of the council for a number of years over a long-term lease for the building.
After lease negotiations took a turn for the worst earlier this year, the club have announced a hard deadline for the negotiations.
Speaking on behalf of the club at Tuesday’s meeting of Moffat and District Community Council, Don Gillespie said: “We gave our trustees a list of questions and suggestions and put some dates on them, because we are fed up of being ignored and this time we said we must have a reply by April 14.
“We want to get an agreement of some sort by the middle of June. We can’t carry on like this, we’re just a volunteer group who are trying to keep the place going. It’s a listed building, it’s an old building and we don’t have the finances to take on that responsibility.
“It’s a nonsense and it’s so simple to sort out and I just hope that we do get it sorted out because it’s served the town for a long time, it continues to do so and let’s hope it stays that way.
“If we don’t find out by September 19 and if the June meeting we have planned doesn’t reach an agreement we will have to vacate the place and the town will lose a building that is useful to the the residents of Moffat.”
In response to the club’s statement, Annandale North Cllr Stephen Thomson revealed that the trustees are looking for solutions that will keep the club at the PI, but that ‘it doesn’t look likely’ that they’ll meet the September deadline, stating: “I think it will probably take a full meeting of the council or an agreed sub-committee of that to say that we will act as the trustee and then either decide to ask the council official to put up some money or help us come to terms with a lease, but that’s what we’re trying to bottom out so that we have a mechanism.
“At the rate things are going so far, it doesn’t look likely but all we can do is try and expedite that, and in the meantime we’re trying to do work-arounds where we can give some money to do some small repairs and keep the club functioning.
“If it gets us to a point where the trustees can say we can draw from external funding, we can allocate a source of funding to oversee the accounts and agree a lease. All things that we should be doing but we’ve never had the support to do up until now, so it’s an ongoing piece of work now.”
