Councillors on the Economy and Resources Committee will meet on Tuesday and be asked to agree to allocate £238,627 to the group, for the design team to make the project ready to tender for works and maximise opportunities for the project to claim Regeneration Capital Funding (RCF) in 2022/23.
The recommendation comes after a successful submission to the RCF at the end of last year for Kelloholm Skills and Innovation Centre, who requested a grant of £2,313,889 and the submission for Old School Thornhill Hub for a grant of £1,100,000.
The sum will come from the funding allocated to the Lockerbie Community Wellbeing Hub project, agreed by the same committee in November last year.
A report prepared for next week’s meeting read: “While the submission for Lockerbie Community Wellbeing Centre requesting a grant of £2,365,000 was not recommended, it was identified by the RCGF Investment Panel as a Reserve Project.
“This means that the panel agreed that the project should be held in reserve for 2022/23 to potentially take up an opportunity for reallocation of funds from within RCGF budget.
“Consequently, the project could receive an allocation depending on making quick progress being made with resolving the issues identified by the panel in connection with the project’s delivery timescales and its regeneration outcomes.
“The panel has requested that the project be resubmitted in 2022/23 – with the call for applications to be issued in the spring of 2022 – and in the event that these issues are resolved and an opportunity arises for reallocation of funding from the 2022/23 budget, the project could potentially draw down grant before the end of 2022/23.”
Under such circumstances, grant draw down would be triggered by the tender and let of a construction contract before the end of the year.
