Councillors will vote on funding deal for town centre fund

Councillors in the Western Isles will next week be asked to approve funding of £15,000 per year for the next three years from Stornoway’s Town Centre Legacy Fund to continue the Town Centre Painting Scheme and to provide support to the Conservation Area Building Grants.
By Peter Urpeth
Published 19th Mar 2021, 10:06 BST
Co-op building at Cromwell Street.Co-op building at Cromwell Street.
Co-op building at Cromwell Street.

The Town Centre Legacy Fund supports works or projects that ‘directly benefit the town centre area of Stornoway and its environs’, but funds cannot be used to benefit individual businesses within the area the fund provides support to.

The fund is entirely dependent on rental income from Stornoway town centre commercial properties owned by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, that being 49 Cromwell Street, which is currently occupied by the supermarket retailer the Co-op.

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A report on the proposals is now set to go before councillors on the authority’s Sustainable Development Committee meeting on Wednesday, March 24, and it states that the funding would enable the Comhairle to meet the ‘high demand’ for the grant schemes, and would allow them to deliver ‘tangible benefits to residents and visitors, improve wider streetscape projects and deliver good placemaking’. In addition they would be able to ‘continue to engender a sense of civic pride and support economic recovery’.

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The report concludes that the continuation of the Painting Scheme and the Conservation Area Building Grants service ‘will support the delivery of the Stornoway Vision strategy’ which ‘seeks to reinforce and connect the strengths of Stornoway to create a vibrant, accessible and connected place where people want to visit, live, work, study, play and invest’.

Related topics:StornowayCouncillorsWestern Isles