MAYOR Tom Sharp has responded to the closure of Goat Track Theatre at Vonda Youngman Community Centre, saying he had wanted to be able to discuss it with the council.
Mayor Sharp said the lease came up for renewal prior to the new council members being elected and negotiations with Scenic Rim Regional Council had already begun.
Goat Track Theatre had been operating on a peppercorn lease arrangement with the council since their inception in 2009, paying a nominal amount in return for bringing in grants and supporting the community by running programs.
However, the council has now said the company must pay commercial rates assessed at $43,000 a year to lease the space at Vonda Youngman Community Centre.
Goat Track Theatre have been forced to move their office to the Gold Coast, while renting the space back from the council for their regular Wednesday classes until September, when they will assess their options.
Mayor Sharp said Goat Track Theatre artistic director, Andrew Wright contacted him to discuss the issue, saying they’d run successful programs raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants.
“Andrew pitched his dilemma to me, and I said, ‘I’m all about the community, bring me the evidence’,” Mayor Sharp said.
“We spoke about four times, and I even got an extension on the lease for him, while I was waiting for the evidence.”
“I rang him knowing the lease was coming up asking him for the evidence he hadn’t supplied, and he said he wasn’t interested and was walking away from it.”
“I said, ‘that is your call, the door is always open, but we need the proper knowledge to be able to make an ethical decision’.”
Mayor Sharp said Mr Wright is running a commercial business, and the council have guidelines they have to follow.
He said there will always be other opportunities for the arts and theatre on Tamborine Mountain if that is what the community wants, and he did not feel the community would miss out.
However, Andrew Wright said he had emailed Mayor Sharp on several occasions providing him with information.
He said he had provided the council with years of documentation, and he wouldn’t be misrepresented by the Mayor.
“He asked what we had brought in to the community,” Andrew said.
“I never said we were walking away.”
“We clearly were bothered and there’s hundreds of emails going back over a period of time showing we were trying to make it work in good faith.”
Andrew said he had written to the council numerous times over a period of about three years documenting the grants that they had brought in to the community and the programs they had run, and a breakdown of the grants and programs run was again emailed in October last year.
“He (Mayor Sharp) wanted us to provide profit and loss statements to show all the different grants and evidence of all the money council had given us over the years in terms of providing school holidays programs and other programs.”
“It meant spending a day showing him 15 years of grant acquittals. Council has evidence of all grants and exactly what they have paid us already.”
“We asked for sit down mediation so all this back and forward wouldn’t happen, but we’ve had to talk to several different levels of council and each says different things.”
Andrew said the six-month extension to the lease did occur, but he was told it was give the council time to ratify its arts policy, which he believes still hasn’t been ratified, so that a service agreement for the lease to be covered through grants could be made.
“I won’t tolerate people trying to rewrite history on it. We have made heaps of offers and they have rejected those offers,” Andrew stressed.
“There is evidence of 15 years of programs where children haven’t paid a cent.”
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