Town Council to shave “thousands” off Tourist Centre building budget

Welshpool’s Mayor has called for councillors to attend a site meeting with contractors to turbo-charge the ongoing work on the Tourist Information Centre.

After concerns were raised last autumn over the escalating cost of reimagining the facility into a more multi-purpose venue, aspects of the job were put on hold to enable the Town Council to fully scrutinise the project.

A working group has been created and at this week's full council meeting, Cllr Nick Howells provided an update and said an end was hopefully in sight.

“We can now arrange for a meeting of the working group on the site which will be sorted ASAP,” he said. “I had a meeting today (Wednesday) with the contractors and we took a preliminary look at some of the cutbacks that we can make that need to be discussed with the rest of the working group.

“We’ve identified a couple of items that were really for aesthetics than for practicability which were costing a lot of money – a very large amount of money actually – and we want to run this past the other members of the working party because we think we can save quite a few thousand quid.”

Pressure on the project budget, which has risen beyond £160,000, were eased by a grant secured to carry out a lion’s share of the work that will see the building also become the headquarters for the Town Council.

“Once we have decided what we want to do, we really need to push this forward now. It has lingered on far too long,” said Cllr Howells.